Chipping Our way out....


We are all very grateful here that the local ice storm missed us by, literally, a mile. My folks went a cold few days without power, but are up and running again now. Today was the first day we braved that area, and it looks like a hurricane went through - mountains of limbs everywhere and the pastures are skating rinks. We have snow that has since turned to ice, but it melts a bit every day, so hopefully things will be less treacherous next week.

On the bright side, I got the best Valentine's Day gift ever - a day off! And, proving the point that great minds think alike, Gi and I baked E this sour cream chocolate chip cake (she picked out the sprinkles from the cabinet :) and E showed up bearing a heart shaped "ultimate chocolate" chocolate cake from Weg's. There is no such thing as too much cake, or too much chocolate, so we're all good!
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We had another festivity-filled weekend here, with a baby shower/poker tournament. It was good all around - A got lots of gorgeous girlie stuff, I proudly presented her with the endless flowered baby quilt, and E won the poker tournament. We just came back form E's parents, where he watched most of the Daytona 500 (and finally figured out that's why our neighbor E has so many people over), and we stopped on the way home for some Coldstone....Gi approved of E's choice: Candyland (vanilla ice cream with snickers and a whole bunch of other candy smashed into it)

Farm chores in the below 0 temperatures are wearing on us, but spring will be here soon enough. We'll start seeds in a week or two...I err on the side of starting things too early and they wind up getting leggy or being planted out before they really should be, so we're holding off this year. March 1st we'll start the brassicas and plant them out under some sort of protection - row covers or hot caps - on April 1st, along with sowing peas and other frost hardy seeds. We'll hold off on the radish plantings till 30 days before our first market, since we don't want to worry about holding those once they mature. I'll start warm weather transplants (tomatoes and peppers this year - we're skipping eggplant) in mid March and start hardening them off to plant in late April.

We were able to re-full the automatic waterer today in the few hours that everything remained above freezing, and we're been pushing on with our beet pulp experimentation, though I stopped giving it to the goats since most of them don't want anything to do with it. If Lucretia doesn't come back into heat, we'll be taking them in for ultrasounds and once we've confirmed their pregnancies start drying them off (we are using US so we don't stop milking just to wind up with a dry, open doe). The big excitement at the feed store this week was a quartet of baby.....emus! Someone must have hatched out a mess of them and realized they had a few too many... Giant ratites aren't my cup of tea, but apparently there's been so much interest they are raffling them off, lol. I didn't bring my camera the day I went by to check them out, but here's a googled image to give you an idea....

I'm excavating my office tonight - E moved some things around to make room for his usb record player in here, and a mess rapidly ensued. Now that my sewing table is clear, I'll be moving the buttons on E's peacoat and then piecing a new baby quilt, this one for a baby boy on the way...I'm thinking about a map-type thing. I'll keep you posted...

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Posted: Sun - February 18, 2007 at 08:18 PM        

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