Greening Up

The trees have sprung to life, no wonder it is called spring.  One day the beech leaf casings were fluttering down like snow then the next day the whole back yard's beech grove had greened out.

It's been a race against the black flies to get things planted.  I searched the house for hours for the yellow wax bean seeds I had saved.  Or thought I saved.  I had a bumper crop last year of beautiful long pods and had let some set.  The house ghost alone knows where I put them.

I found some crummy looking ones marked 2015 and planted them in a window box since I expect poor germination.  I think those are the ones I used last year and I had maybe 5 out of 25 or more seeds come up.  I ended up transplanting the 5 and babying them and got a ton of beans off 5 plants.  Plus all the seeds I can't find.

I am hoping I get a few to come up out of the last seeds and can repeat the process this year.

I was supposed to make a town run today, but nothing critical on the list and I think I can stretch it to next week.  It is absolutely gorgeous weather and I really don't want to waste one of the remaining days of my life in town worried about getting COVID.

The state has finally increased its testing capacity with a deal with IDEX.  We were told to expect cases to go up with better detection since they dropped the requirements to get a test.  But that's not stopping them from opening full steam ahead.  Restaurants and campgrounds have been added to the kk list, but our town office is still closed go figure.

I had a nice socially distant chat with a 90+ year old neighbor whose wife went into a nursing home right before this happened.  He hasn't been allowed to visit her in weeks.  They have been married 60 years.  It makes me so sad to see him suffering when people can get their hair done or sit in a restaurant. 

Update on my vaccine comment-I have since heard that the RNA is from part of the virus, not from people's immune response.  But then Stephen COlbert had a bit on last night that cows  being used to create vaccines. Usually his stuff is rooted in truth so now I will have to go look that up.  Stay tuned.

Spring 2016

Spring seems slow coming despite our relatively mild winter.

This time last year I think we still had snow on the ground, so I am not sure why I am complaining!

The Phoebes came back around their usual time, the beginning of April.  Apparently they did not find things to their liking, because they moved up the neighborhood until the last week or so.  Now they are back, nest building under the eaves.

The first summer I started building the house, they went right through the framing and built a nest on the top plate under the second floor joist!  They have returned every year since.  I know spring is finally here when I hear the pee-wee, or kiss-it, call of the phoebe.  I miss them when they move on.

We planted peas. I bought a pound of peas seed, and we have planted peas everywhere we can think of, and it does'nt look like we put a dent in that pound of seed!  Guess I got a bit carried away.  I paid $4.99 PLUS tax for that pound of seed.  I couldn't believe they tax food seed now.  This state is just getting too much.  We pay tax on newspapers now as well.

I have seen daffodils blooming here and there, but ours haven't opened yet.  The red maples are just starting to bloom, and the alders have put out their catkins.

We have had a big red fox harassing the geese.  He's made two grabs for them.  I have a pen to lock them in during the day, but when I let them out in the morning I let them splash in their big puddle and nibble some grass while I am tending the goats.  A couple Saturdays ago I let them out and then went back in the house to hang on the internet for awhile, and then I heard their distress call and the dog lept off the couch barking.  I looked out the window to see Mr. Fox running across the lawn, so I grabbed the cam and snuck out hoping to get a pic of him.

He skirted the treeline, unaware of me, circled around across the drive when I took a chance to creep closer with the Blazer between us blocking his line of sight-then he made another dash for the geese on the other side of the blazer!  I jumped out and he fled through the woods out back, so no pic but the geese are ok!

I say he when referring to the fox, it may be a she, but I suspect it's a big dog fox.  They both hunt for the kits, and it is possible there are hungry baby foxes nearby.  The foxes come yipping around the house at night-I step out and holler at them to move on, but they are not as skittish as the coyotes.  The neighbors must think I am nuts.  Still, I know I can be scary because if the cat is up to no good and I yell, "HEY!!!"  I scare the pants off the Willow on occasion.  LOL

We had a light rain last night and the sun is just coming out.  Things had been very dry with extremely high fire danger because things have not greened up much yet.  6 acres of Marsh burned down in Old Orchard beach last week.  The old grasses are very dry, and we had big winds to go along with it.

I think I will head outside for the rest of the afternoon  The biting insects will be out any day, and that makes playing in the garden a lot less fun.  In fact, it is a frequent sight in Maine spring to see folks in their gardens high stepping and waving fist fulls of seed around their heads.  It's called, "Doing the Black Fly."

Welcome Spring!

Oh boy, first day of spring!  The equinox was yesterday, but as the Willow and I were discussing this morning, that would probably count as day zero and this as day one!

We've had a long cold winter! 

I am glad that I tapped the maples over President's Day weekend.  We have been in the deep freeze since then.  A couple of days have cracked the freezing mark, but not enough to really get the sap flowing.  I have managed to eek out another gallon or two of sap by draining the small amounts out of the chunks of ice in the collecting jugs.

Two of the jugs I pulled off and brought in the house to thaw before I put them back on, and of course that ended up being one of the few days that the sap dripped a little bit!

I lost track of how much sap I have processed.  I think I started off with twelve gallons, plus a couple more.  I gave up trying to do it on the kitchen stove, and turned over one of my hot water pots on the woodstove  for sap reduction. I can put about a gallon and a half of sap in the pot.  Then of course by the time I want to go to bed, it is at a critical level.  Meaning, it will be burnt sugar by morning but too much to boil down on the kitchen stove before bed.  So, I usually just add another gallon of sap and go to bed.

I have to be careful though, because one year I kept doing that with a larger pot, and went to bed thinking it would be ok until morning, because there was several inches in it.  But I had lost track of how long I had been adding sap, and I woke up in the middle of the night to a house full of acrid smoke and two inches of black on the bottom of the pot.  Ugh.  I couldn't smell maple syrup for two years after that; the smell lingered for weeks in the house.

Yesterday morning we had had several inches of snow that turned to rain, what an icy floody mess!  Several of the animal houses were full of water because there was so much frozen snow the melt had no where to go.

The sap ran a little yesterday. I got two and a half gallons.   One tree had a half gallon of dark sap, and I would think some trickster had urinated in one of my jugs if I hadn't seen that in past years.  I don't know what causes it, but I set that one aside for now.

Today it is gorgeous out, a little windy perhaps, but well above freezing.  I have been stockpiling smaller pieces of firewood for the old kitchen woodstove that is outside.  Once I get buried in sap and have a nice day, I should have enough fuel to boil it down outside.

Right now I am trying to bake a chocolate Babka.  I had found this recipe online for chocolate doughnuts, which the Willow wanted instead of regular ones.  They are really awful!  It was 1/2 cup of cocoa to 8 cups of flour!  They look like a chocolate doughnut but are soooo bland!  And eight cups of flour! That made a lot of dough!  I fried off the first half and froze the other half.  Then I thawed it and tried a few more last night.  We even tried glazing them with chocolate chips and rolling them in sugar.  Uck!

So, I decided to take the rest of the dough and make a chocolate filling and bake it.

I think I should have added more sugar and butter...lol. still craving!

  I hope it's good I am starving!

Chasing the Green Man

We are "jonesing" for spring around here. A very snowy February has left lots of snow trying to melt, revealing squishy squelchy mud in the places the sun has won the melting battle.

The Willow and I took a walk yesterday.  I took the hearts off the mailbox post and put up the daffodils.  I considered putting up shamrocks, but I didn't have any green material, nor do I have much Irish in my blood.

We decided to take a walk along the stream. The sun was nice and warm, but the air was still cool in the 40's.  We were looking into the pool and marvelling at how clear the water was.  I still have a bit of gold fever, so my eyes were scanning the bottom for any shiny bits.

I saw a nice pendant sized quartz glittering about 8 feet from the edge.  I found a couple of long sticks, and tried to pick it up likeI was wielding  a giant pair a chopsticks.  As soon as the sticks would break the surface of the water, ripples would form breaking the clarity of the water, and I would pause trying to be still and let the water settle to find my target.

Three times I managed to get the little stone in between the sticks only to drop it as I tried to retrieve it.

We scanned the area for something to stand on. I considered taking off my boots and socks and rolling up my pantlegs  and wade in for it, but I knew that water was colder than I wanted to tread.

Willow found a driftwood stump that I placed in the water for a precarious foothold. I teetered, concentrating, straining to reach the bright stone. I watched the cuff of my sleeve break the water as my fingers scrabbled for the evasive rock.

"KERPLOP"

I heard a big splash at the end of the pool, and I thought it was either a fish or The Willow hucking rocks, so I kept my balance and my focus and kept reaching...

"OOOHHH DID YOU SEEEEE THAT?!?!"

My head jerked up, my balanced shifted, and I threw my feet in what I thought was the shallowest direction since I was about to pitch face first into the pool.

I splashed in and my momentum carried me another leap into what turned out to be the wrong direction.  I was up well over my knees, my boots and their thick felts immediately filled with spring melt water.

I quickly headed up the ridge, each boot weighing over eight pounds each with it's gallon of water, my feet and ankles burning and freezing.

I made it up to the rock wall and asked the Willow to run back to the house and get  my other boots. I pulled off the boots to a gush of water, and tried to shed my socks which had somehow shrunk and stuck to my feet.

By the time the Willow had come back with the other boots, I was finally barefoot, but my feet were too wet to put on the boots, so I walked along the top of the stone wall barefoot, skirting the patches of snow on the ground. When I ran out of wall, my feet were mostly dry so I put the dry boots on to cross the snow field on the lawn.

(yeah, I am not THAT tough)

Later that afternoon we set ten sugar maples taps, The Willow ceremoniously catching first drips on her tongue off each tap as it went in.  She doesn't care for the boiled down maple syrup, but she loooves the fresh sap.

Today I was reading about shamrocks and spring things like that, and I found out there is (used to be?) a spring tradition in the UK involving a parade and someone dressed as the Green Man. Which culminated in the Green Man being dunked in the stream to ensure plenty of rain for the growing crops.

The Green Man is said to rise with the sap in the spring .

Welcome Spring.

Dunked, barefoot, and tapped. :)

March winds

The winter that wasn't. My prediction for tons of snow couldn't have been more off. We had 80F degree temps several days last week. Our road turned into a swamp. My driveway ate a truck. Willow saw a butterfly. I was bitten by mosquitoes. We saw a bunch of ladybugs.

My lilacs are budding. Crocus and snowdrops are blooming. Ticks are everywhere.

Then the North winds came down yesterday. The ground refroze last night. The chicken water froze all day long. The winds are gusting enough to shake the house.

No one knows what to make of the weather. MY goats keep coming into strong heat, including my senior doe that didn't even show much heat last fall. The migratory birds have returned.

I was a little late in getting the maple taps in. I put in 10 taps and got about 16 gallons of sap in two runs. That made about a quart of delicious maple syrup. That's an estimate since I put it up in fancy jelly jars and cool jars I saved, like the charming little squat better than bullion jars. I just boiled the jars for ten minutes to sterilize, and then poured the hot syrup in and inverted them until cool.

The heat last week put an end to the sap run. Maine Maple sunday was this past sunday, and I bet no one was running fresh sap through the evaporators! I left some poor trees with the taps in, cince it was supposed to come off cold again. I think I will pull them, though, since it takes many smoky hours boiling the sap down(if there is another run) for syrup and I am feeling lazy. :)

We are all actually hoping that we don't slip back into a typical Maine spring, because everything is so far ahead of season that a cold snap could be devastating.

Vernal Equinox

Beautiful day out today! A couple days ago we had 65F in the shade, then flurries the next morning. Still getting below freezing at night.

Yesterday was the first day in ages I left the fire out all day.

My driveway collapsed. It ate a Jeep Wrangler. The passenger side axels and bumpers were resting on the still frozen driveway. The passenger tires were no where to be seen. There was water pouring under the driveway on that side; the top frozen layer gave way.

That was the worst case of stuck I ever saw anyone in my driveway. My Hay guy came over the next day with his 4WD pickup and a chain and I got to learn how to drive a standard in reverse, except the Jeep didn't budge.

Three jacks, digging, and chopping the frozen ground free of the tires, and digging two diversion trenches to try and drain the stream flowing through the tire rims away, and several more attempts and we got it out! Yay!

I really wanted to get pictures but the batteries for the camera were flat!

I found it extremely amusing that my driveway ate a 4WD Jeep Wrangler. Until I worked for two hours to help get it out.

Now I have an impassable driveway and I am parking my car halfway up. My road (not my driveway)is so bad, my neighbor came over and told me the postman, who drives an International 4WD, has refused to deliver mail on our road for the last 10 days.


The road commssioner is not taking any calls.


My car has 6 inches of clearance and patched brake and power steering lines, but I have to drive it or walk a mile. I have had it sideways twice and didn't slide in my car once all winter, but the mud is so deep it throws the car.

We had huge winds Friday and lost the power for a couple of hours. The neighbor came over to see if we had power. Thank goodness it came on just as darkness fell even though Willow had the candles and lamps lit.

We have bare ground in places, and 6-8 inches of snow in places. The plowed snowbank on the lawn is still 3 feet or so.

Happy Spring!