Pre-Garden Update

In February, I ordered seeds for this year's garden.  Later that month, I sewed the peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, watermelon, marigolds, asparagus and rhubarb indoors.  With the exception of one variety of peppers, (the Peruvian ones, wouldn't you know, because DD2 & I were so excited to get those seeds), they all sprouted and are growing well.

Once all the seedlings in the trays had unfurled their first sets of leaves, and when DD1's bridal shower was over, I erected my little 'greenhouse' (the acquisition of which I blogged about here several years ago) and transferred the trays into that. For over a month now,  it has held a prominent spot in my living room, right in front of the big sliding door that faces east, and also in the path of one of the two south facing windows of that room.

Inside, everything is warm and humid and green.  It's so nice to see green stuff, as outdoors most everything is still brown and yellow from the winter.  The grass in the yard had barely started to grow late last week when we got hit with a really nasty cold and wet spell.  Saturday was rain, Sunday was freezing rain and sleet, Monday was snow, and even today has been little spits of snow now and then with a cold, cold wind.

It's so nice to look in the greenhouse and see green.  Like the ferny asparagus fronds. And the tomato plants with their strong thick stems and 3-4 sets of leaves all ready.

baby asparagus

August's fresh tomatoes

Since it's too cold in the garden still to plant anything, even the peas or lettuces, I've been prepping what I can. On Friday, I received my one and only order of seed potatoes for this year.  I'm adding Superior (bought from The Maine Potato Lady) to the many varieties I all ready grow.

Meanwhile, down in the cellar, I have quite a few potatoes left from last year's harvest.  Each crate or basket is a different variety, except for two or three that I had a bumper crop of and needed more than one storage container for.

the left half

the right half

Most of them are starting to chit (grow sprouts), and so I took my handy little kitchen scale to the cellar, where I put it to use measuring out 2 pounds of this kind for seed, or three or five pounds of that kind for seed, depending on what amount I want to harvest of each variety.  In general, average yield is roughly 10 pounds for every one pound of seed potatoes planted.  So, for instance, the really nice big oblong ones that we use for baked potatoes or slicing into french fries, I want to grow more of than I do the fingerling ones which are good for roasted potatoes and potato salads, but that we don't eat quite as much of.  And the round red ones that make the really creamy mashed potatoes, I want to plant lots of those too.  Thanksgiving dinner alone at this little place here can easily use up five pounds of red potatoes for mashed potatoes.

purple potatoes chitting

Once measured out, each variety went into it's own box on the shelf, to await warmer weather (and warmer soil!) out in the garden.  All together, I have roughly 27 pounds of seed potatoes set aside.  

What's left in the baskets and crates we will continue to eat until they get too old and withered to be palatable.  That typically occurs in late April or early May, depending on how quickly the cellar warms up.  Even though many of the potatoes have little sprouts, the sprouts can easily be knocked off and the potato cooked as normal.  It doesn't affect the taste or edibility of the potato any.

Boots, A Rope, and Some Puddles

A little boy.  A pair of rubber boots.  A piece of rope.  Lots of puddles.  Add some imagination and what do you get?

An hour or more of 'fishing'!

patiently waiting for a bite

Apparently some 'big ones' live in the puddles of my driveway.  At least, according to Toad they do. Every 'fish' he caught was a 'big one'.

Done!

Done tapping trees for the year, that is.  I went ahead and pulled taps today.  Its been about six weeks since I put them in; the buds are swelling, the sap is getting a yellowish tint, not to mention that today's high temperature is well over sixty degrees.  It's time to be done. 

fat buds on the maple trees

This has been a spectacular season for maple syrup at this little place here.  I have nearly three gallons of finished syrup, and should net about a half gallon more from the sap I have yet to boil (last week was really cold, and there was no sap all week, followed by a huge rush starting this past weekend). By my estimate I have boiled off roughly 115 gallons of sap and am in the process of finishing another 25 gallons .  That means I've collected 140 gallons of sap this season. From just 10 taps! 

What has been interesting to me is how the production of each maple tree varied from its neighbors.  Of that 140 gallons, a huge portion, maybe almost half, came out of just two trees.  These trees, with just one tap each, practically gushed sap on the hard running days, and maintained a steady drip on other days.  Now other trees barely trickled anything, adding up to perhaps a half-gallon on a 'really heavy' day, and having more than a few days where their taps were completely dry. One tree has been dry as a bone all this week while the others have been running well. What was even more interesting was that the over-achiever trees were not next to each other, and were often within anywhere from 4-10 feet of trees that were stingy.

Hmm.  A science mystery for me to ponder.  What made the capillary uptake of these heavy sap producers so much different from their neighbors?  Could  they, in some way, have been 'stealing' moisture from the root systems of the trees closest to them, hogging the groundwater and minerals, as it were? Or was it just the individual nature of each tree to produce sap at different rates, the way people are individuals with varying metabolic rates? Were they just super trees?

just pop the spile out with a little pressure from the hammer

the hole will heal over, 

just like the one from a few years ago above and to the right of it

Whatever the reason for those two extraordinary trees, the sap run is finished, and I have plenty of syrup stocked for our needs in the coming year, plus extra in case next year's sap season isn't a favorable one.

I didn't get any of the light Grade A syrup this year, but I did get quite a bit that is a nice shade of amber. 

Now all I need to do is finish boiling off the last few buckets of sap, wash all the buckets and spiles to get them ready for storage, and take the milk jugs in to the local recycling collection point. It's time to move on to gardening season at this little place here.

Recurring Dreams

For a while now, actually several years, I've been having weird dreams roughly once every month or two that, when I look at them as a group, all have the same or very similar theme.  They aren't happy dreams, which in itself is troubling (who likes to have disturbing dreams?  Especially regularly.)  I typically wake up from dreams like this feeling stressed, emotionally spent and unsettled for many hours afterward.

I don't get into a whole lot of superstitious stuff, or delve much into Tao, energy, aura, etc kinds of things.  However, I do believe our dreams are somewhat indicative of what our subconscious mind is concerned with.  So, to have recurring dreams on a theme is causing me to take a look at my life in general.

According to my dreams, I seem to be feeling:

--confined by family (typically in any one dream there are many members of my immediate or extended family overwhelming me with either their presence or their demands/needed care)

--hunted??? (often a feeling of being followed or having to stay one step ahead of someone trying to get to me)

--deserted by my husband (he often is in the beginning of one of these dreams, but somehow disappears leaving me to fend for myself or otherwise get myself out of a situation I don't want to be in.)

--dropped into situations without my consent (hosting large gatherings where people just start showing up unexpectedly, moving to/buying a new house I had never seen or even known we were about to move, having to share my house with one of DH's sisters and her husband and offspring because they couldn't afford their own home any longer, etc)

--having to fix things I know very little about while people around me pass by, or make demands on my time and attention, without offering me any assistance in my very vital and on a deadline repair efforts


I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of this is wrapped up in DH's ongoing long work hours and demands of his job that take him mentally away even when he is physically with me.  Also the revolving door we seem to have with our kids moving out, moving back in, moving out, maybe moving back in again for a while, or another kid moving back in simultaneously or immediately after one of their siblings moves out. . . or having the care and raising of the grandkids unexpectedly for weeks/a month+ at a time.  Add to that the fact that these moving back ins are more like having roommates than being one nuclear family again with the parents determining the rules, division of labor, what goes where, and schedule.  (I've never had a roommate--I went from my parents' house to having my own house and power, so this is really difficult for me.)  Plus the fact that we are still financially supporting several of our offspring in one way or another. . . cell phones, car insurance (and repairs), money towards unexpected expenses while still in college. 

And most of all my increasing need for my own space/empty nest/life.  I know that the longer this goes on, the more my children get into their twenties and seem to be less self- and financially sufficient than I was at the same age, the more often these dreams come.  I wonder if this is the way the rest of my life is going to go; if they will never actually grow up and leave me to my own pursuits (and monetary plans).  Because if so, honestly, this isn't what I want.  It isn't the way I raised them; it isn't the the plans DH and I had for the second half of our lives.

That's just our own descendants.  I can't even start on our own brothers and sisters and how their life choices affect us now and again. . .

Yarn Along, April. What?

How did it get to be time for another Yarn Along all ready?  March was such a long month (compared to February), but suddenly I'm finding myself staring at the calendar and realizing it's the first Wednesday in April!  Time to join Ginny and see what sorts of yarn-y goodness everyone is up to, as well as check out some possible reads to add to the book list.

As for me, I finished the first (left) of my Deflect socks and am roughly half-way through the leg portion of the second (right) sock. I have to say, doing a cable pattern on a portion of the heel stitches certainly has stretched my comfort zone. Not impossible, but definitely not the I've-done-this-so-many-times-I-can-do-a-heel-flap-on-autopilot heel that I'm used to. I may have had to unknit a few rows. And maybe even more than once before I got to the heel turn.

Reading wise, I've got a couple of things going on right now.  There's the current issue of Taproot magazine that arrived in my mailbox last week.  Also thumbing through A Year of Pies, and reading slowly essay by essay through A Glorious Freedom, both of which I got through my local library.

But what's gotten most of my attention in the last few days is a book I didn't even know existed until maybe two weeks ago: Lessons With Margot.  It is book number five, I guess, of The Dressage Chronicles series.  Apparently after finishing the series with book four, the author decided to kind of do a postscript specifically of technical horse training types of stuff.  I indulged myself and ordered it off of Amazon literally five minutes after discovering that this book existed. Written in the first person and being sort of a memoir of the author's own training and dressage riding experiences, this book is just as engaging as the fiction novels in The Dressage Chronicles series, and I just love reading it.