Almost Imbolc

We are very nearly halfway through winter... February 2nd marks Imbolc, a day celebrating the journey back to light as the season of darkness wanes.  Aside from two dinky snowfalls that melted within a day or two, it has barely felt like winter at all.  The crazy daffodils are poking their little heads up, fooled into believing that Spring has come already.

Yesterday was such an unusual sunset... the sun was almost below the horizon as it peeked out from behind some clouds, lighting up the top of the sycamore tree against a stormy grey sky.  Beautiful.

I'm making slow but steady progress on the veggie garden in between rain storms.  The chickens, of course, have been a tremendous help.

This lil' Australorp helped me build some stone steps.  She's quite the engineer.

It's been kind of nice putting together these garden beds in a time of year when I can't plant anything.  It's a much lower-pressure sort of task when I don't have plants wilting in pots as they wait for their home to be finished.  I did find that in the far right corner of this area, someone had decided to burn some trash as some point.  Charred bits of random crap have been discovered under there.  So, that section of the garden will be dedicated to non-edibles... I think I'll plant native wildflowers for the bees and hummingbirds.

This past week was one of unexpected expenses.  I had to drop $700 on repairs to my car, and it became unpleasantly apparent that we need to have the septic tank pumped.  I'm not thrilled about either of these developments, but this is adulthood, right??

January gardening

I tore my knee open on a half-buried metal fence post while working in the garden last weekend.  It's not healing well, and when I showed it to one of my coworkers for a second opinion, they asked, "What the hell were you doing gardening in January anyway?"

Okay, so it sounds weird.  But in my defense, it hasn't been very January-like lately.  We've had a very, very mild winter so far.  And last weekend the temperature outside was in the mid-fifties, with a blue sky, and I was sweating in a t-shirt and overalls whilst laboring in the soil.  The few days we have had below freezing so far this year have been the exception, not the rule. So it's not like I was shoveling snow out of the way to work in the garden.  I'm not THAT crazy.

Also, I'm fighting my way through my seasonal depression.  Physical labor and the smell of soil are two potent anti-depressants for me, and the greenhouse only needs weeding every so often.  And with autumn being such a busy time for us this past year, we pretty much just let the knee-high grasses and weeds die and lay where they fell.  There is plenty to be done out there that doesn't require warm weather.

Looking ahead to Spring, we were starting to contemplate where we wanted to build our vegetable garden.  At first the hillside above the pond seemed like the best place, so I started clearing it of weeds.  It soon became quite apparent that we would probably need to enlist the help of a professional landscaping company to properly terrace that hillside.  That was when I tore open my knee, right through my pants, on that damned rusty fence post.  Looking out across the yard, covered in mud and bleeding, I noticed the area of fallow ground between the paddock that holds our perennial beds and the greenhouse.  It was covered in dead grasses and sumac saplings, and went largely unnoticed all year.  Here is a picture of it in the early Spring.... imagine it a full season later and having never been mowed:

So here I was, looking at all this nasty dead yellow grass and thinking, "well, maybe we can build our composting bin system along side the greenhouse there.  I'm going to clear away some of that dead stuff and see what the ground looks like".  As I was raking away the dead grass (which, by the way, comes out with its root system and all at this time of year when the ground is wet and the plants are dead), I was thinking to myself, "Huh, this looks like fairly decent soil, not like the red clay we have everywhere else..."  Then my rake hit something that felt like stone a few inches below the soil.  A bit of excavation revealed that there were brick and stone paths about 3 inches down.   Someone had a garden here sometime in years past... one with well-tended soil, if I'm not mistaken. 

As I cleared off the bricks and stones, I started setting some pavers and stones we had lying around to act as walls for my newly discovered raised beds!

 Sorry about the thumb.

There is still a significant amount that I haven't unearthed but have felt with my shovel.  In the lower right corner of the above photo there are two that I've found but haven't effectively cleared yet, one going off to the right and one coming straight at me.

I'm so excited to have found this hidden treasure.  We will expand upon the work done by whoever gardened here before us.  This spot gets full sun, is a fair distance away from any of the bloody black walnut trees, and has rich, loamy soil that has been resting and waiting for tomatoes for who knows how many years. 

This discovery, in combination with the fact that I've placed a couple of seed orders (I know, I said I was going to go minimalist this year but I can't help myself!), has me daydreaming about when the world looked like this:

Gosh, I miss the color green.....

Hooray!

I found a garden underneath the weeds!!!

"The Empty Room"

That's what we've started calling the upstairs bedroom that we finished last weekend.  It's a misnomer, because the room is far from empty.  But we are keeping it sparsely furnished and uncluttered intentionally, to create a calm, quiet place free from distractions.

 If and when I purchase a new laptop (mine is toast) for school this upcoming year, it will live a quiet and industrious life on this old oak table.  The printer will reside in the office, and they will communicate wirelessly.  No mess of cords and speakers in my work space. 

Today was the third consecutive day of my daily morning yoga practice... a new year's resolution that I am determined to keep.  It is a pleasure to do sun salutations and balance postures while gazing out that window.  Plus, these happy cacti get much more delicious southern sunlight than they did in the kitchen.

That mass of hoop tubing will be moved to a new home soon, after we get some more wall hooks mounted in the office/Hubbybunch's workshop.  Then that hook will hold only a few of my own personal hoops, readily available for me to grab and play with in the wide open space of the room.

This makes me absurdly happy.

In other news, I placed a seed order already!  Some for the greenhouse (scallions, carrots, salad greens, spinach) and some for our future veggie garden (roma tomatoes, brussel sprouts, yukon gold potatoes).  I also bought a few raspberry canes to replace the ones that didn't make it in the berry patch this past year.

We have a LOT of work cut out for us this year as far as the garden goes.  Our plan for the vegetable garden is to terrace the western-facing hillside above the pond.  It's going to be quite the undertaking.  That hill is currently infested with tall grasses, sumac trees, and milkweed.  A dry-stacked stone retaining wall is already built at the bottom of the hill, but we haven't cleared it of vegetation enough to be certain that it is in good shape. 

We have yet to decide what we're going to built the walls with... stone looks best, and allows water to drain between the stones instead of getting backed up and putting pressure on the wall.  However, it is expensive, heavy, and labor intensive to install.  We were considering composite decking material as an option, but that too it pricey, though not so labor intensive to work with.  All I know right now is that I want to do it right, so it lasts for many years and doesn't collapse the whole hillside in a heavy rain.

Either way, I'm thinking Spring!

A Monday-off-from-work Project

We bought our home in March 2011.  It was full of carpeting.  I am of the belief that carpet, no matter how well-kept and frequently vaccummed it is, is dirty.  It is especially dirty if you are inheriting it from some other family with god knows what sort of home hygiene habits.  Within 48 hours of closing, we tore out the carpeting from every room, leaving it only in the upstairs hallway because it was obviously brand new and we decided that project could wait.  The flooring in our bedroom and the office went in before we moved our furniture in.... but the two smaller upstairs bedrooms have been naked plywood ever since. 

This past Monday, both Hubbybunch and I had a day off from work.  We woke up, made some coffee, stoked the fire in the stove, and decided that we would tackle one of those bedrooms.  We ran out to Lowe's, bought 6 more boxes of Pergo to add to the 2 we had leftover from the office, and got to work.  Within two hours, this room that has been unused (except as a dumping ground for stuff that was meant to go to the attic) became a warm, inviting space.

This room will likely be a guest room, though I'm considering setting up my sewing machine in there as well.  It's exciting to have what feels like a whole new room in the house!