It’s been over a year since I’ve put up anything. Why? Well… Life keeps happening….

However, I recently set my screen saver to random pictures from iPhoto and it has been so much fun seeing snippets of our life that I’m going to try to start adding to the blog again,

Spring is Oh So Early this year. In fact, winter lasted the month of November, which included snow and then a wind storm that blew down 8 major trees on the homestead and a bunch of small ones. The big ones are slowly working their way into the new woodshed.

The woodshed has been dreamed of for 20 years and imagined in numerous places. Finally, friends Greg and Marshall helped us put it up last fall. It has three bins, and the first bin is stuffed with 5 cords of green wood drying for next winter. The second bin is slowly filling with wood from the blowdowns. The third bin is suppose to be for morning wood, but now holds the 2 dry cords that we had to get to last us thru this winter. And the electric log splitter (a must for aging hippies) sits in the front of the morning wood bin. All of this wood feeds the three homestead stoves.

Weather? I regularly have to call my sister, Gayle, in New Jersey and ask, most solicitously, if she’s snowed in. I usually have a fairly good idea that she is before calling. Then I can report such details as sunshine and 55º (in February in northwet Washington?) and the warmest January (and now probably Feb) in recorded history.

The bees have been active for the last month. All three hives survived the winter, which we are very grateful for, since many beekeepers in the area lost a large proportion of their hives. We suspect that it may be partly because we live so remote and are less likely to get diseases from other bee hives. Also living on the edge of hillside full of fire-weed, gave our bees a lot more pollen last fall, when most of the county bees were suffering from a lack of pollen and nectar due to the drought.

Otherwise, the pond had ducks return earlier than normal. The regulars are 6-8 each of mallards, ring-necked ducks and wood ducks. Occasional visitors include a pair of hooded mergansers, a great blue heron, and a muskrat. Fortunately, the tree-cutting and garden tunneling beaver hasn’t been seen recently.

Since the weather has been so mild and there have been so many sunny days, I’ve managed to spend more time weeding in the flower beds than in past winter. Still have a longs ways to go to get all the flower beds weeded, but ahead of past years.

Last year, Shannon and Marshal help me get the veggie garden area made into raised beds with sawdust paths in between. The garden got off to a great start last year, but…. After we spread compost over all the growing beds, we found ourselves with a garden of kale. The kale had grown on the working compost pile and then gone to seed. All the seeds were waiting in the compost and burst forth when spread on the veggie beds. So, although we did recover some veggies from the kale forests, and ate and froze a lot of delicious kale, it was rather overwhelming. So this year, no mercy for any kale outside its designated bed.

Marshall helped me weed several of the garden beds a couple weeks ago. Planted Cascadia sugar snap peas, which have done the best here; a lettuce mixture, arugula and a ‘micro’ salad mix. Supposedly, in about 14 days, when the first set of real leaves come up, you cut them off for salad, and a week or two later, do the same. A ver!

Marshal (and Carl) have been building us a couple more ‘sheds’. The lawnmower, wheelbarrow, garden tools and lumber shed turned out to only have room for the lawnmower and wheelbarrows? Why you might ask….. Well, nearly half of that shed is now enclosed on three sides, with three windows, a raised floor, a ramp going up to the floor, and rumors of a carpet. The reason? The new home of Carl’s two electric bikes.

Two you might ask? Well, the first electric bike…. let me pause here to explain that this suppose to mean ‘electric assisted’…. i.e. you pedal as hard as you can going up hills and the electric motor ‘assists’ you to actually make it up the hill. And, when you go for a long ride, the electric motor ‘assists’ you to get home again. This all implies that you are actually pedaling, along with the ‘assist’. Which may be true most of the time. Though I do get excited reports about going 24+ miles an hour on the straight-away, no pedaling.

Anyway, the first assist could get Carl up the steep hills on either side of us on Mosquito Lake road. But what he really wants to do explore and camp on the logging roads around us. Bike number one, a Trek, could get him up some of the logging roads, but there wasn’t enough assist to get up the logging road behind the homestead.

So now he is awaiting his new bike, being put together in a local bike shop: The bike frame is a Big Dummy and the motor, a Stoke Monkey. (I did not make that up!)