When we woke up this morning it was snowing and the ground had a skiff of snow on it. Over the course of the morning it melted. So yay! We could work outside this afternoon on filling a raised bed.
Then the sky got really dark and we could see the snowing coming towards off, down the mountains to the west. Pretty soon it was all around us.
So this is what it looks like outside right now.
Snowflakes on the brand new lilac leaves.There are mountains to the east but you couldn’t prove it in this picture. And the ground and trees are all getting white again.
The wind is blowing too, so all in all it’s kind of unpleasant outside at the moment.
View off the back porch looking toward the creek, which is quite noisy. Spring melt (appearances notwithstanding), is proceeding.Pretty light phase Red-tailed Hawk was hanging out in the the trees next to the house.
Yesterday evening, when it wasn’t white outside and we still were under the impression it was spring, Oro told us about a hawk landing in the trees to the east of the house. This looks like the same bird we saw most of last year, which did a lot of hunting in the grass in our front yard and across the road. There is a pair of these hawks which nest in the trees along the creek. We hear the Ravens complaining about them.
So today is a good day to stay inside and watch the weather being silly.
Nothing much was happening for a couple of months while we waited for the snow to melt.
We have a ton of work planned for the garden. And we thought about finding some yard minions but decided we would simply give up that plan and just do everything ourselves.
A snowfall on January 20th put a couple of feet on the ground, and the wild turkeys were making paths from the woods to our bird feeders in front of the house.
So while we waited for the snow to melt I fixed things we really love.
Khachapuri – cheese cushions. These are so hard to resist, soft bread lightly sweetened with honey, and a melted cheese filling.
Our favorite soup.
Cream of celery soup.Baked lentils with cheese.Sweet rolls, and cinnamon rolls.
The fruit trees and bushes, and strawberries we ordered arrived and the snow melted just in time for us to start digging holes and planting them where they belong. There are more rocks in the ground than seems totally necessary, but a very long pry bar, a shovel, and a big guy made it possible to make places for trees and plants to live. The fruit trees are all semi-dwarf, so they won’t get so big.
We had to plan on the spacing as if the trees were full grown and not the wee babies they are now. So there is a lot of bare ground around the baby plants. Eventually we will have to smooth out all the ground and remove all the rocks, then lay out ground cloth and cover everything with several inches at least of bark mulch. This will do several things for the garden, besides looking neat. It will keep the ground moist, very important in the hot dry summers here, and keep the weeds down to a dull roar.
The farthest tree is an apple tree with four varieties of apples grafted onto the root stock. The closest tree is a pie cherry.
Both these trees have a really good shape and so all we had to do was add top soil and compost to the holes, then plant the bare root plants.
The closest tree is a peach tree, and on the farther tree is an apricot.
I love to make peach butter and apricot butter. It will be at least four years before we get any fruit from these baby trees.
Two varieties of raspberry canes, six of each.
These plants are well armed with thorns but we found that the thornless varieties don’t have the same flavor. We opted for combat berry picking.
We learned a different way to plant the raspberries, basically as a 45 degree angle with the roots very shallow and stretching out across the hole. The new canes come up from the roots so this method will give us the maximum number of canes from each root we planted.
We might see some raspberries this year, but both varieties bear fruit on the 2-year old canes and a smaller fall crop from the 1-year old canes. Next year it will be all the raspberries we can eat and freeze, and make jam and pies and pancakes, and muffins. Yum!
The berry plants are jostaberry, black raspberry, gooseberry, black currant and red currant. All these plants are ultimately huge!
Jostaberry is a cross between a black currant and a gooseberry and it’s Dan’s favorite jam as it is very tart. It will be two years before I have anything to play with in jam-making but in three years I should be back to having more fruit than I know what to do with. And to make things more interesting we have ordered a second jostaberry plant and two blueberry bushes. Those haven’t arrived yet.
One of our four raised beds we built last fall. We tacked on hardware cloth, a heavy wire mesh, to the bottom of the raised bed to keep the pocket gophers from making a home in the raised beds.
Each raised bed is four feet by eight feet, and we will have twelve of them once all is said and done. Four are built, so far, and the 2×12 cedar boards for the remaining eight beds are sitting in the yard waiting for us to fill the first four.
A raised bed full of topsoil and waiting for strawberry plants!
Today we filled the second raised bed.
Dan getting ready to start moving wheelbarrows full of topsoil over to the raised bed. It takes about sixteen wheelbarrows for each raised bed.
An hour later the second bed was filled, we added a bag of compost to the top of each bed and raked it in to mix it up. Then we soaked baby strawberry plants in water for about fifteen minutes and then laid them out on the topsoil and planted them.
Twelve strawberry plants arranged so they have lots of room to set runners and make even more strawberry plants by the end of the summer.Water well once everybody is where they belong.
We will get some strawberries this year and then next year it will be full steam ahead. These plants produce really big strawberries which are perfect for chocolate covered strawberries.
We are used to seeing turkeys fly past the windows, though it is still a bit startling because they are so big! But there was drama today and we almost missed it.
A ton of feathers against the fence! Somebody hit very hard and since these are turkey feathers we know one of the birds made a sudden abrupt stop. The question was why….
Right after Dan saw the flurry of feathers on the fence he saw an adult Golden Eagle flying west but alas with empty talons. So he missed, poor bird. They are one of the few birds of prey that will try to take something that large. There are Goshawks around here as well, and they will also go after a turkey if they are hungry.
This was quite a few feathers!!
I went out on the porch to make sure it was turkey feathers and not eagle feathers, and sure ’nuff.
The down is so soft and light and warm.
While I was out on the porch, there was nary a bird to be seen. And I could hear the turkeys off in the trees having a spirited conversation about the events of this morning. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the turkeys to return to picking up the seeds dropped on the ground by the enterprising small birds.
It was a close enough call that it won’t be surprising if we see the eagle again. We’ve been expecting Pygmy Owls and Cooper’s Hawks or Sharp-shinned Hawks to start staking out the bird feeders. Just a different kind of bird feeder.
They were right across the fence, heading towards the river or down to the creek to browse on brush.
Baby has a bunch of snow on his/her forehead. Cute! Pretty deep snow but it’s going to get deeper. The weather forecast is for six inches to a foot of snow starting tonight. I guess we need to move some more pellets to the porch as it might be a few days before we can dig our way out.
We heard from a friend that people on our road further up the hill saw three feet out of this last storm. Yikes! I am sure this new storm forecast is not exactly what they wanted to hear.
We are getting a real winter this year. We just had over a week of low temperatures below zero and high temperatures in the single digits. Last night it started warming up and it was a balmy 25F this morning when we got up to see a good six inches of snow had fallen.
Our little bird friends are awfully glad there is roof over their seeds!
This year we have chickadees, juncos, and finches. Last year we had a Pine Siskin invasion and no juncos hardly at all. Plus we have our turkey crowd who wait below the feeder for the generosity of their tiny brethren in dropping seeds where they can get to them.
Somewhere are four raised beds along the back fence. They are completely invisible right now.
The snow piles up on the top bars of the fencing, and then as soon as it warms up or the wind blows, it all goes poof.
There are no mountains to the east. Since we can’t see them, they don’t exist, right?
The Starlink satellite dish has internal heating so it stays nice and clear, though it does grow icicles.
The trees along the creek are holding a lot of snow on their branches.
And it is snowing again quite vigorously. We may see another few inches today before all said and done. There are a few more days of snow predicted this week. I guess we’ll wait to get the driveway plowed again. It’s a good thing we drive an Outback!
The sun came out this afternoon, and our driveway is plowed.
I probably spend way too much time pretending the cat is thinking about something.
His ears say it all. When they are pointing backwards, he’s not pleased.
So, “We are not pleased.” is an obvious thing he could be thinking. “What is that ##$%^?” is another thing he could be thinking. Dan says using the word “thinking” when it comes to The Cat is probably not particularly accurate.
It snowed again, a nice fat two inches which may be here a while. And to think three days ago it was 50F!!!
700 rows completed! This light I’m hanging it from sure affects the color of the yarn which is actually a really beautiful teal blue.
The shawl is now longer than I am tall. Okay…. Granted, this is not as huge an accomplishment as it might be. But still, can’t argue that it is longer!!!
Piled up on the computer keyboard in front of the pattern I’m following.
I have started on the 9th and final ball of yarn. I stuffed the entire project into a freezer bag and weighed it on a scale and including the plastic bag and the knitting needles the project comes in at 8.7 ounces or slightly under 247 grams. This is slightly more than a cup of water. Amazing.
It will take me a few more days of knitting to finish the body of the shawl and then I start the cast off on the top border. Each stitch cast off (185 of them) takes between 30 to 38 stitches to accomplish.
There are remaining patches of snow in sheltered areas, but by and large it is mostly all gone.
Earlier this morning we were completely fogged in due to the very high levels of humidity in the air caused by the melting snow. Pea soup!! It finally lifted enough to be able to see the trees to the east and the mountain beyond. It’s all very soggy.
Just finished row 600 on my knitting project.
Getting to the part of the pattern when the knitting is a little easier and goes a bit faster. The need for a blocking plan is becoming more urgent. I’m going to be finished knitting a lot faster than I thought I would. How cool!! Also kind of cool how the color of this yarn changes due to light conditions.
Today was a good day to stay inside and take it easy.
Mishkin has the “stay inside and don’t do much” method down to a fine art.
It snowed all morning long but since it’s also slightly above freezing temperatures the snow didn’t amount to anything except the beauty of falling snowflakes.
Finished 500 rows of knitting so far, and starting another new ball of yarn. It is starting to get long.
Love the color of this yarn and I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to go about blocking the finished shawl for days now. I definitely need a plan, one that will exclude cat participation.
Haven’t made a pineapple upside down cake for years and this baked perfectly. We’ll see how it turned out this evening. I haven’t tried this particular recipe with gluten free flour before. That’s always somewhat of a mystery, whether or not it will work.
It’s still snowing lightly this morning and supposed to keep doing that very thing for the next few hours, then clear up and no doubt start melting all this lovely snow. Can’t see any mountains at the moment, but it comes and goes as the snowfall gets lighter or heavy.
Looking towards the south.
Looking towards the east.
Looking towards the north.
The snowplows haven’t gotten to our road yet, and people driving down the road to take care of whatever errands they are up to throw up clouds of snow into the air. It looks cool, but our parrot Oro doesn’t approve. Mishkin is sleeping through the entire event, as usual.
It is a winter snow advisory (for those people who never actually look out the window) but not a storm. We are supposed to get three to five inches accumulation. And because this is the first real snow I’m making cinnamon rolls. They are sitting next to the oven raising, and a batch of sweet rolls are now baking while we’re waiting for the cinnamon rolls to double in size.
Can’t see the mountains to the east, and can’t see the trees very far to the east either.
It looks kinda foggy but it is just lots and lots of little snowflakes in the air.
A small group of turkeys, probably a family, were milling around in the yard and talking softly to each other about something.
They get pretty snowy on their wing feathers and back but are toasty warm with all the down feathers they have.
By tomorrow morning it may very well look like winter out there.
Update. Got about six inches of snow so far. Woo hoo!
Dan had a couple of sweet rolls as soon as they came out of the oven, and then had no room for cinnamon rolls. He will remedy that situation this morning.
I made some cinnamon frosting for the rolls last night and frosted them once the rolls cooled.
