It has begun

It has begun.  The season when we work outside so much that we stagger inside in the afternoon, ravenous and tired, wondering what the heck we'll do for dinner.

Mud is streaked across the floor from people rushing in with their gardening shoes on, just to retrieve a snack, or the phone, or the camera, an action so fast that it's not worth taking your shoes off.

This is the season when my fingers feel like sandpaper and my fingernails are perpetually stained, since I don't like wearing gloves when I work in the soil.

After record rainfalls for the past two months and not seeing the sun for weeks, it finally came out for a couple of days.  It came out full force, and so did we.

It went from the first picture on Friday to the second picture on Sunday.

On Sunday, we debated if we should take kayaks to Puget Sound and hang out on the beach in the sun, but then we decided that we would rather get some work done at the homestead.  

Lots of bamboo had been beaten down by the snow, and lots of other things needed to be pruned.

So while Steve applied the chainsaw and other sharp things to the bamboo and other overgrown thickets, I started weeding buttercup from my garden beds.

The buttercup campaign turned into a full blown "Wow, this soil can be worked! Let's plant garlic!"

Of course, I enlisted the help of my kids, who are a part of this homestead and know that if they want to eat, we need to plant things.

Eva helped dig and find worms, Luke helped broadfork the garden bed, and Kai separated garlic cloves.  And then all three kids planted them with me.

I am beyond ecstatic.  When all that snow and later on buckets of rain dumped on us, I felt nervous about the soggy state of my soil.  But it has so much organic matter and awesome soil structure after building it up for 14 years that drainage was no problem.

In the endless dark winter days I sometimes forget how much I thrive on gardening.  Burying my hands in the soil, smelling the fragrant earth and growing things make me come alive.  Happy, happy, happy.

Thus, the garlic got planted successfully!  And yes, we plant garlic in the spring, whereas most people do it in the fall, but in our wet climate, spring planting has been more successful for us, since we don't get the mildew or mold issues we otherwise get with it.

In the evening, we built the first backyard bonfire of the year and grilled our homemade pork/goat sausages.

I can't tell you how good it felt to be out there.  To be sure, it did get very cold once the sun went down, but the raging fire kept us warm.  

It also kept my sweet dog, Yoda, warm.  Plus, you can see I knit him another sweater.  He's a great outlet for my knitting passion, since he's so small, and I can knit one of these sweaters in two evenings.

Can you spy the little critter on my lap?

I really love that my kids are old enough to be a real help.  Preparing the garden beds and garlic cloves, broadforking, applying fertilizer, and then planting all these rows of garlic would have taken me twice as long without the kids' help.

I rewarded them by making apple cobbler with whipping cream for our cookout.  Food is a great motivator.

Talking of food, I've been making bread like crazy.  Below is my fermented bread I teach in my virtual fermentation workshop.  It is so, so easy to make and tastes better than the bread you buy at boutique European bakeries, if I may say so myself.

And our very own shiitake mushrooms are growing!  We inoculated a log two years ago, and the suckers are cranking!

Let me leave you with images of last week.

The first one is Eva with the socks I've been knitting for her while I have been teaching her how to read.

The others are from a recent walk, when the sun was miraculously shining for a couple of hours. Check out the one of the eagle I caught on my zoom lens.

I hope you'll have a splendid week!

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Planting garlic, organizing, and parading at Mardi Gras

I'm sorry to tell you people from the snowy East Coast this: Yesterday, I dug compost into my garden in a T-shirt and then planted garlic. It felt like April or May. It felt awesome.

For most of the past decade, I've planted garlic in the fall, but last year did it in the spring, and it worked out fine. Our garlic likes the compost I make from goat bedding, and it thrives.

I put the boys to work separating garlic cloves into individual pieces, and they also helped me plant it.  Who else do you know who does this wearing Mardi Gras necklaces?

Before planting, I weeded all the pesky buttercup from the garden bed, and then double dug it with my old broad fork.  Have you ever used a broad fork?  I love that thing: it deepens and loosens the soil without disturbing the soil layers, which is great for the microbial life in there.  Plus, it's great exercise for the broad fork wielder (me).  Also, I think the worms appreciate not being torn up by a fume-spewing rototiller.

I spent an hour strutting around in the garden to plan my crop rotation.  I have a tattered old gardening journal reaching back ten years, where I record what I plant where, and how much of it.  It's important not to plant vegetables from the same plant family in the same spot year after year, and there are some veggies that are good preceeding crops for others, and vice versa.

I'v been on a frantic nesting/organizing/cleaning up kick.  Spending five weeks in a small RV, where everything has its place, I got inspired to do the same thing in my house, where messes accumulate daily and never get cleaned up.  So upon returning home, I attacked the play area, a space underneath our stairs that has been an eye sore for years, because it's in plain view of everyone who enters our house, and because it is chaotic.  I filled two big boxes with books the kids don't need any more, and a big garbage bag with toys for the Goodwill.  Then I cleaned up an area on my kitchen counter which has held bins of the boys' homeschooling curriculum.  I organized it and stashed it neatly on shelves in the play area.  Voila!

Other nesting activities:

- Collecting duck eggs.

- Baking sweet bread with the duck eggs.

- Foraging for wild greens like nettles and miner's lettuce (the nettles are up already!!!!).

- Weeding my flower garden.

- Going for walks with rainbows.

- Starting some sprouting jars so we'll have fresh green stuff to eat on top of the wild foraged foods.

I will leave you with images from the Mardi Gras parade in Concrete, a little town half an hour away from us, and filled with people we call our community.  We get together every year to party on the main street of Concrete, dressing up, and sometimes dressing up our goats.  Our neighborhood band "Jumbled Pie" played music on a trailer towed by a pick up truck.  Great fun!

Glorious spring days!

It's days like the past two that make living worthwhile. Days spent outside in the sun, digging in the earth, planting stuff, getting my vegetable garden all planned out. My back is hurting from all the shoveling and hauling compost in the wheelbarrow. But – oh – what wonderful compost it is! It's my pride and joy, home made from my goats' bedding, and it will nourish hundreds of pounds of vegetables I will grow for my family this year.  I forced bribed talked Kai into helping me shovel.  He's younger, and he has a better back.

I don't like using a rototiller in my garden, because it's not great for soil structure, and because it murders worms and other beneficial creepy crawlies. I use a broad fork, which loosens the soil without mixing it all up. It's backbreaking, yes, but it makes for some pretty nice muscles! The boys and I planted our garlic yesterday. Most people do it in the fall, but since it's so wet here in the winter, I like to plant my garlic in the spring. It always turns out gorgeous. The seed garlic I used is all from our crop last year.  Look at them in shorts and T-shirt!  Shorts and T-shirts!!!

Here, my crew is separating garlic bulbs.

And here, they are tucking them into the soil.

Other signs of spring: growing bellies on the pregnant goats (we might have baby goats in a little less than four weeks), crocus blooming in the yard, my seedlings thriving in the greenhouse, rhubarb unfurling its leaves, buds swelling. It is glooooorious, darlings!

I know, she looks skinny from that angle, but believe me, she's got a belly on her.

Also, there were picnics by the beach in Bellingham, and bike rides to the playground in Rockport.  The boys rode ahead of me, while I pulled my heavy four-year-old in the bike trailer.  We did a 15 miler the other day, in order to train for our ride over the Cascade Mountains in the fall.  It's going to be a party, I tell you, and the more people want to join us for the ordeal, the better!

We went frantic with the past two days of sunshine, because we know it surely will rain again, for days and days and days on end.  And it still might snow a bunch...  So we took advantage of the sun and made "paint" with ground rocks by the creek.  The boys promptly decorated all of us, and we had fun taking selfies.  

A selfie with me and Kai after our bike ride, with Sauk mountain in the background.

Last but not least, our chickens got a haircut this week.  We thought the ladies were slacking on their egg production, since we only got one or two a day, sometimes none. But then we realized the little stinkers fly over the fence and hide their eggs in the forest somewhere.  We are tired of buying expensive, organic grain for them, just so they can hide their eggs from us.  So we armed ourselves with scissors and headed for the chicken pen.  Catching them can be tricky, and once we had them in our arms, they screamed bloody murder.  We cut off their flight feathers so they can't fly off any more.  Since we did that, there have been plenty of eggs in their boxes again!  Hurray for outsmarting chicken brains!

And then, of course, there's always the knitting.  The knitting, the knitting, the knitting.  This week has been all about the Lotus Hat (pattern free on Ravelry).  I cranked out three of them, and we get compliments wherever we go.  I even put one up for sale in my Etsy shop.