Well it keeps on snowing around here. It doesn’t stick to anything down low but let’s just say we’re really glad not to have to drive over the pass today! The mountains we can see to the east were very white this morning.
The garden doesn’t care about snow at this point!
As soon as we planted the two beds of strawberries winter came back with over a week of low temperatures between 23F and 30F and all their baby leaves they had when we planted them died off. But they survived! Most of the plants are putting on new leaves and looking quite perky. Even if some of the plants didn’t make it, it won’t matter as runners from the plants that did will fill in the raised bed.
This is such a tiny cherry tree, around two feet tall. It will be a good three years before we see any pie cherries from it. It will be worth the wait. There’s really nothing better than a cherry pie with freshly picked fruit.
This baby plant has lots of leaves and is starting to grow some formidable thorns. It’s a total adventure picking gooseberries and black raspberries. Dan will need to get some new welding gloves made with really thick leather and even then the thorns go right through the gloves unless you’re being really careful.
Both the red currant plants are doing great, lots of leaves which will become branches. Most likely next year we’ll have at least some red currants to play with and make into jelly.
So far none of the seeds I planted have germinated, though Dan thinks maybe some radishes are starting to come up. Personally I think it’s just weeds, but another few days will tell. Pretty soon this will be all full of green things.
We planted thirteen seed potatoes, 8 rows of green peas, a bunch of onions, two rows of radishes, four rows of salad greens, two rows of spinach, two rows of Swiss Chard, four rows of beets, and four rows of carrots. All of these seeds don’t mind cold weather and some actually prefer it. The warm weather, aka wimpy, seeds will all wait until the end of May.
At least this raised bed has some green things in it, a benefit of onion sets!
Our new project in the garden is to pick up all the rocks and lay out the ground cloth and then cover it all with bark mulch. It won’t be this next week as very cold wet weather is projected until next weekend.
The dark gray rain clouds behind the tree show what it is in store for us the rest of today. I took advantage of the break in the weather to take all these pictures.
The lilac bush is also getting ready to bloom and it does perfume the yard.
It was either buy a new couch or build a new room onto the house, and this was way more convenient and quicker. We thought Mishkin would really object to this change in his world, done once again without his permission, but he doesn’t mind it at all though he refused to hop onto it until both of us were sitting and then he jumped up and lay down between us and stretched out his full length to claim as much of the couch as he could cover.
Finally found a gluten free pie crust recipe that worked really well, even if the dough was extremely fragile. I think if I’d put it back into the fridge for an hour before rolling it out it might have been easier to work with. But regardless it was the right texture and taste. Yay!
For some reason I don’t seem to be able to memorize this border pattern yet. I am hoping I can keep it in my head by the time I start the body of the shawl. Because I haven’t memorized it yet progress is very slow and feels very tedious.
The hummingbirds really appreciated the feeder being under cover this morning when it was raining hard. They are so cute!!
We have both a pair of Mountain Bluebirds and Tree Swallows who are interested in the nest box we put on the outside of the garden fence. As of now we don’t know who is going to successfully claim that particular nest box.