Red Sky At Morning, And The Last of The Onions And Garlic

This morning when I got up, there was a brilliant strip of red on the eastern horizon.  By the time I got downstairs to the camera, this is what the sky looked like.

It was a beautiful, red, sunrise.  Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. . . We were supposed to get freezing rain overnight, but it had held off.  The rain/sleet combo actually started a little before 10 a.m. and continued all day today, sometimes pure rain, sometimes rain with ice pellets mixed in.  Needless to say, I got a little wet doing horse chores.  Hopefully my Carhartts dry out before I need to wear them tomorrow morning.  They are too caked with hay chaff, sawdust and other debris to stick in the dryer, so I just hung them in the mudroom.

Since I'd spent a good deal of the morning in and out of the rain while working at the horse farm, I spent most of the afternoon working inside at home.  Much needs to be done outside, but today just was not the day to do it. Instead, I did housework (oh, how I love housework, NOT!) and a little inventorying of the food stocks in storage since late last summer.

We are still doing great on potatoes.  About a bushel and a half left down in the cellar, and they are in wonderful shape for this time of the year.  Most are still nice and firm, with very few sprouting yet.  Which is good, because I won't be planting seed potatoes (the 'wrinkled' and 'sprouting' ones from the cellar) for at least a few weeks.  The garden finally thawed, but the soil is still very cold and currently waterlogged.

Onions, I took down the last bag from where I'd had them hanging in the basement, and went through it.  A few had gone bad in storage, and a few more were sprouting, so I emptied out the bag and sorted the good firm ones from the ones that were more fit for the compost pile than eating.  I ended up with a small basketful of good ones, enough to probably get us through another month or so before I run out of homegrown onions.  Which means I'll only have to buy onions for about three months before I have fresh ones ready in the garden again.

Likewise I went through my stash of garlic from last summer's harvest.  If the remaining heads don't wither, I should have enough garlic to get the early batches of dill pickles canned without having to buy any garlic from the store.  And shortly after the cukes begin to ripen, this year's crop of garlic will be ready to pull.

Have I ever mentioned how much it thrills me to eat food that I grew, right here, for most of the year?  It is such a cool feeling to put a meal on the table, day after day after day, and see that most of the components of that meal are the fruits of my labor.

Red sunrises are really cool too, even though they usually mean outdoor working conditions aren't going to be too wonderful that day.