Chop Wood, Haul Water

There's been a lot of rumblings around these parts about it being "a long winter." In fact, if my friends and I had it our way, #wilderbrothers and #buckwheatstash would have been trending on Twitter for the last month and a half. There have also been jokes a plenty about rationing out one shriveled potato a day and worrying about how we'll tunnel out of our homes through the snowy depths.

Are you picking up on the Laura Ingalls Wilder The Long Winter allusions I've been throwing down?

But here's the truth: It hasn't been a long winter. Last year was a long winter (perhaps we think this winter is just an extension of that one, since summer kind of barely happened), but as far as actual time elapsed with wintery conditions in winter 2013-2014, there's actually nothing extraordinary going on. We've had snow cover since late November and it'll probably hold until early April, just like it does every year.

Nope, the only extraordinary factor about this winter is how bloody cold it's been. As a result, we've been hemorrhaging firewood since December and by mid-February we were down to the "new" wood - the birch firewood we'd stacked in the autumn to dry out for winter 2014-2015. Argh. This means, for the last month, we've basically been trying to burn wet cardboard for heat. Needless to say, it was not going very well.

But before you send the Wilder Brothers to save us, I can happily report that we live in a wildfire recovery area, which means there's no shortage of dead trees to burn when the heating gets tough. This cheers me considerably, although a part of me has always fancied breaking up the dining chairs and chucking them into the woodstove ala Doctor Zhivago. To me, there is nothing so romantically dire as having to break up the dining room furniture with a hatchet. 

On our last days off, Andy felled a couple of dead jack pines from the property, which will tide us through until spring days (which are already partially upon us, despite the -20F temps this morning) and allow us to save the not free firewood until it's seasoned properly. As an additional bonus, removing those trees also mean more sunshine for the potato patch come summer.

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In other news, this isn't exactly a spring tiding, but one of the Meyer lemon seeds has finally poked its sunny little face out of the dirt. I'm really looking forward to harvesting my own lemons sometime in the next decade . . .

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Smell Like Dirt

“In spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
 - Margaret Atwood 

When we were in town last week, I ran into the hardware store to pick up a couple bags of seed starting mix.

"This is so exciting!" the clerk said as she rung me up. I tend to agree.

By gum, it may not look like spring around here (ahem, sub-zero mornings, 3 feet + of lake ice, and a good 12-18 inches of compacted snow in the woods), but at  least since I started the first batch of seeds on Sunday afternoon it smells a little bit like spring. Now every time  you walk into the cabin, you're greeted  with the earthy aroma of warm, moist soil, a smell I most associate with the interior of greenhouses. Ahhhh! Just a single whiff gives you hope!

To date, nothing's sprouted, but any day now the first herbs, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli and more will be poking up their first little green shoots.This marks our third summer of serious gardening and I'm hoping for another successful and fruitful year.  Each year we get a little wiser in our gardening ways, but one of the joys of gardening is it unpredictability.

As I observe our eating habits and how well vegetable types grow, I try to modify our garden each year so we get the best delicious bang for our buck. Considering that I still have a gallon bag stuffed with cabbage in our freezer, I'm cutting back considerably on the amount of cabbage I plant this year and will instead increasing the amount of broccoli and kohlrabi . I'm also experimenting with a few new types of tomatoes since we can never get enough garden grown tomatoes around here. Whenever Andy asked why a batch of soup was so good this winter, the answer was always, "garden tomatoes." We'll also be planting more carrots and potatoes and I have my fingers crossed for a better squash year.

A few brand new veggies/fruits we'll be trying out this year are ginormous kohlrabi (you harvest them when they're 12 inches in diameter rather than 2-3"!), a watermelon with a short growing season, and eggplant.Will any of it grow? Who knows?

One thing we won't be doing this year is expanding our gardening space. Instead we'll be trying to use the space we've established over the last couple years as wisely as we can.

It's amazing to think that what is right now a teeny little seed in the dirt will, in a few months' time, be tall, green, strong and  producing pounds of food. For me, gardening's worth it just for that miraculous affirmation: that with a little love and care, the tiniest speck of an idea can be transformed into something incredible.  

Are you gardening this year? What are you planning? Have you started your seeds yet?    

 

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March Forth!

Sooooo  .  . . who else out there is stunned that it's March?! I've heard mention of just how speedy this February was on at least two blogs and in several Facebook posts this morning, so I'm know I'm not alone in my incredulity. February may be a short month, but I'm pretty sure we only got a half February this year. Ah well, no reason to dwell on the time that's already flown by. Now's the time to march forth . . . into March!


While March has a reputation for being rather blustery and harsh at times (in lion, out like a lamb, eh?), I've always had a soft spot for this month. To me, it's a month filled momentum as we gear up spring and summer. Granted, all that momentum pretty much falls flat on its face come April's mud season, but I truly appreciate March's optimism before the dull reality of April sets in.

March is slated to be a busy month around here and I'm rather looking forward to it. Along with all of the regular goings-on, here's what's on the docket for March at Of Woods and Words:

Wrapping up two rather large freelance projects. It will feel great to finish them and even better to invoice for them. (Kidding about the invoicing. Okay, not really.)

Hockey tourney time! That glorious weekend of the year where I watch so much hockey and knit socks. God bless the Minnesota State High School Boys Hockey tournament.  

Hockey tourney time means birthday time and while birthdays have less and less significance with each passing year, I'm not opposed to a little birthday sugar (here's lookin' at you key lime pie) to start the new year on a good note. 

Beware the Ides of March. I'm not really preparing for anything truly horrific on March 15, but it is deadline day around these parts, so there's that.

St. Patrick's Day. I love any excuse to be sentimental about Ireland. (In case you hadn't noticed.) If you need help getting your Irish on, check out the fun St. Paddy's Day inspired items in my Etsy shop.

I'll be the lower peninsula of Michigan for St. Paddy's Day this year visiting brother and girlfriend with my mom. I'm looking forward to the trip (especially since we're flying rather than making the 15+ hour drive), but dear brother, please move to Hawaii.

Grand Rapids, MI

And once I return from Michigan, it will be spring. Huzzah! Time for starting seeds, days longer than the nights, and the start of cookouts!


Whether March came in like a lion or a lamb in your neck of the woods today, I hope you're also looking forward to a wonderful, full and fulfilling month.

 

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Groundhogs, Candlemas, and February

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Come winter, have another flight;
If Candlemas bring clouds and rain,
Go winter, and come not again 
-- Traditional English Rhyme

I've always paid attention to whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow on February 2nd, even though around these parts,we usually have another six weeks of winter in store, regardless of whether or not the second day of February is overcast. Despite having a bit of a preoccupation with Groundhog Day (although, believe it or not, I had never watched Groundhog Day until just last month!), it wasn't until a friend posted a variation of the traditional English rhyme above that I realized just how long we've been paying attention to shadows on February 2nd.

Feb 2. marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, making it a prime date to cast forecasts about if we'll be getting the full winter we're due, or if we'll get an early spring instead. The date also marks the celebration of Candlemas, a Christmas feast where candles are brought into the church to be blessed. Seems appropriate that halfway to spring, we celebrate the candles keeping our homes bright during the dark winter.

As for those groundhogs, they got thrown into the whole Candlemas weather predictions because Germans decided to use hedgehogs to tell if the sun threw a shadow on Feb 2.  Lack of hedgehogs in the New World (lame, New World, lame), forced German immigrants to substitute the way less cute groundhog for this weather predicting tradition.

And since somehow we got on the topic of hedgehogs here (what the . . . ?), a shout out to all ye Redwall fans - who remembers Ferdie and Coggs?!

I'm afraid any groundhogs in this neck of the woods who bravely showed their faces on Saturday got blasted with subzero temps and a healthy dose of sunshine. I guess this winter is here to stay.

And yet, spring truly is just a mere six weeks off. Although it's not unheard of to have snow in April (and sometimes even in the early days of May *sigh*) around here, it does the heart good to know that spring's appearance on the calendar is really not terribly far off.

Soon, I'll unplug the outside Christmas lights since Andy is thisclose to consistently coming home while there's still some daylight left. Progress!

Although I know it's a long way off until the season of wildflowers and t-shirts, I'm still amazed by how quickly this winter has gone by. It's been a busier winter than usual around here and I've made decent progress with all of my winter projects, although I need to sustain productivity levels at least through the end of this month, if I'm going to meet all of my deadlines and still have a bit of time for fun after the snow melts and before full-time work fires up again.

Even though I will spend most of February at my desk, putzing away on projects, I'm having great fun watching the activity at the ice fishing "village" that pops up out on the lake each weekend. Apparently Andy and I were trendsetters when it came to driving on the ice. I've never seen so many trucks on the lake before, which is just fine, after all this cold weather there has to be close to 2 feet of solid ice covering the lake. Still, we're going to have some fat fisherman this year, not because they caught so many fish, but because they never exercised!

Regardless of whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow in your neck of the woods, I hope your heart is filled with the promise of spring. It's closer than we think!
 

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May Day! Mayday?

May Day has to be one of the few holidays I've never celebrated.Of course, this is one of my best friends' favorite holidays, so I can't say I've never never celebrated May Day, but it is a holiday that I don't know much about and that generally slips by without my noticing.

Perhaps my neglect of May Day stems from the fact that the holiday is linked with the Celtic holiday of Beltane which means the day's all about celebrating fertility. Around these parts, things don't look too fertile come May 1. It won't be until sometime in June that we'll be able to fill "May baskets" to overflowing with flowers and actually feel like dancing about a May pole in celebration of the world's abundance and beauty.

After the early spring thaw this year, we've been treated to an especially long period of muck and brown before the spring green up. But this past week, I noticed the earliest early season wildflowers starting to poke up their pretty little heads. Wood anemones, violets, bearberry flowers, even the appearance of the common place dandelion is enough to make my heart glow with the promise of springtime.  

Full disclosure: photo taken in 2010

Yesterday, I ran to town to get the first load of soil for the new raised beds and pots. I returned with a Subaru Baja absolutely brimming with compost, humus, manure, top soil, and peat moss. After filling up one raised bed, I came inside to find not one, but two little wood ticks scampering across me.  So the wonderful joys of spring are upon us, as are the little annoyances.

On Saturday, Andy and I thought we might watching an entirely different sort of "Mayday." A rather large personal airplane (a Cessna Caravan to be specific - if you're interested in such things) landed just outside of the bay and headed over to the dock where the neighbors keep their own (albeit, much smaller) float plane during the summer months. It's pretty unusual to see a plane of this size in the area unless a portion of the woods are on fire, but it turned out that the pilot and passengers were just looking for a dock protected from the wind where they could moor the plane during an overnight visit to a friend's cabin. Not exactly a dramatic story, but the plane caused plenty of buzz during its short stay in the bay.

Happy May Day everyone! What are you celebrating today?

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And then it was gone

Our ice went out on Saturday night.

When I woke up yesterday and peered out the window, I found open water as far as I could see down the lake.

I've never been around for ice out before and I'm not sure what I was expecting. The tinkling of magic bells? A chorus of fairies heralding in the spring? The ice didn't even makes its usual groans and cracks this year as it went. Instead, it just disappeared.

Honestly, I kind of miss the ice. I may not love winter as a whole, but ice and I are good friends. (Well, maybe let's exclude black ice . . . .) Since this winter was without writing dates with the neighbor, I didn't make regular treks down the lake this winter and I feel like I took this year's ice for granted and let it go under-appreciated. Our rapid thaw this month meant the ice basically dissolved in front of our eyes and we never reached the point where the snow on top of the ice melted down to a crust as hard and sturdy as a sidewalk. No long rambles down the lake this March on top of "sugar cookie" ice like I'd hoped.

Still, between skating on the lake in December, a hike down the lake where we discovered recent wolf tracks, and a couple ice fishing excursions, it was a lovely ice season while it lasted:

December 2011

January 2012

February 2012

March 18, 2012

March 25, 2012

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Sowing and Socks (But not sewing socks)

I fell asleep last night to the pitter-pat of rainfall on the roof. While I'm no fan of sleeping through thunderstorms, I think the sound of a gentle rain is one of the loveliest sounds there is, a sweet, happy tinkling herald of spring and regrowth.

I always welcome a good rainy day, but we're especially grateful for rainfall this spring. After a low snow year, we need plenty of moisture to help the woods green up and to keep the forest fire danger down.

After last night's rainfall, the ice in the bay looks like it's seriously thinking about shipping out for the season. The ice is already out on some of the larger lakes up here, making it the earliest ice out up here ever. We're beating the prior earliest ice out dates by nearly three weeks. Yowzers!

The rain inspired more action outside today. I found a trio of sprouts out and about the yard this afternoon:

From left to right: lettuce sprouting in the cold frame, the first rhubarb nubs poking up (please let these be productive this year; otherwise I will have to barter homemade jam for rhubarb - I can't go two springs without it!), and garlic shoots. Last year, none of these guys were poking up until the end of April.

While Mother Nature is getting way ahead of herself this year, I'm planning to stay right on schedule with my seed starting schedule. I figure if I start things way ahead of time just because right now it feels like the end of May, we'll probably end up with a series of killing frosts when it actually is the end of May. (Hey, I never said I was an optimist.)

I'm not getting any more adventurous with this warm weather than starting a pot of lettuce in the cold frame because, frankly, I'm not terribly attached to the lettuce. Sure, it would be swell to have a fresh lettuce salad in the middle of April, but I'm not going to be too heartbroken if my little lettuce sprouts succumb to some unforeseen disaster in the next few weeks. Since spinach likes cool weather so well, I may start some spinach too because, well, same thing, I don't care too much if it flops. 

For things I don't have such a laissez-faire attitude towards - i.e. my tomatoes, peppers, basil, etc -- I'll be keeping them inside until late April at the earliest. Better safe than sorry.

Last night the UPS man delivered the pack of seeding starting mix and the last seeds I needed for this season, so tomorrow I'll be clearing off the kitchen table, turning on weekend NPR, and getting the first set of seeds planted. I'm planning to stagger my planting a bit more this year so I don't have nine kohlrabi that all want to be eaten at the same time this summer.

Here's what's getting sown tomorrow:

• Tomatoes (Early Girl, Brandywine, and Yellow Pear Cherry) 
• Jalapenos 
• Bell peppers 
• Herbs (Parsley, Sweet Basil, Thai Basil)
• Broccoli (first planting of three) 
• Cabbage (first planting of three) 
• Kohlrabi (first planting of three) 

I should start some flowers tomorrow too, but I honestly haven't put much thought into those.  All of our prime growing real estate (that is to say: sunny spots) in the backyard are devoted to veggies, so our flower beds tend to be rather sad and scraggly. In a twist of ultimate irony, I spent my pre-gardening days longing for a flower garden, but now devote most of my energy to vegetables while Andy, who initially wanted to grow vegetables, tends to the flowers. I will for sure start some nicotiana tomorrow because it smells so very lovely on summer evenings. As for the other flowers I'll start, who knows, eh.

Other weekend plans include finishing up this little sock's mate:

If you're looking closely, yes the top ribbing is a different color. I used little bits of leftover yarn for the ribbing to make this a true stash busting project. This is my first toe-up sock and I have to say, it was a revelation; no blasted kitchener stitch! That said, although I like the appearance of the toe much better than I do on my leg-down socks, I don't particularly like appearance of the heel when handled with increases instead of decreases. However, the fact that I have more control over how much yarn I use is great for when I have limited amounts of yarn at my disposal because I can stop knitting at any point on leg. That means things like this can't happen: 

Remember those frilly anklets I started back in January? Where I ran out of yarn halfway through the second sock? The yarn I need to finish up that forgotten little sock went on sale this week (you didn't think I'd pay full price for it, did you?) and with any luck, the yarn will arrive tomorrow.  Maybe this weekend will end with two new pairs of woolen socks. . . .

And to those of you (ahem, Mollie) who kindly suggested I just finish up the sock with orange yarn, I'm sorry to say that I am a wimpy, unadventurous knitter who ordered more matching turquoise yarn to finish the anklet. I am boring.

Have you started seeds for the season? What are your weekend plans?

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The Winter That Wasn't: Part II

So back in January, I penned a post entitled "The Winter That Wasn't." The basic gist of the post was: "Okay winter. Shit, or get off the pot." (Of course, I was far more elegant at the time.)

Well, apparently winter listened, because at some moment last week (I think it was Monday), winter decided to get off the pot. And winter didn't dilly-dally. It didn't waste time singing "Happy Birthday" to itself while it washed its hands. Nope, winter 2011-2012 took a drop of Purell and hightailed it on out of here.

I mean pussywillows on March 18th? Come on!

I wanted to love it. (After all, the moral of the story in "The Winter That Wasn't - Part I" was oh, I wish it were spring already.) But honestly? I find this absurd weather kind of creepy. It's not that we're having an early spring. It's like we've bypassed spring all together and are in the midst of summer. And I'm a girl who likes her seasons to come in the proper order, please and thank you!

I know the whole country has been experiencing some crazy high temperatures this spring. But for most of the winter, up here in northern Minnesota we've been able to hold onto some semblance of winter. That all changed last week when we started having consistent highs in the 60s. On Saturday, the temps climbed to 70s. The forecast doesn't hold any promise of it cooling off for quite some time. Already, the ice in the bay is looking downright rotten.

As a compare and contrast, here's what the bay looked like on April 11th, last year.

It's not unusual for the ice-out date for this lake to be in early - mid May. This year, it looks like ice out could come in March or early April which would be a new record. 

I want to soak up the sunshine and be enamored with this unseasonable weather. But instead I see extremely low water levels. Unless we have a veritable monsoon this spring, we are going to be in for some extreme fire danger this spring and summer.

I ran walked over to work yesterday afternoon to pick up some books and found that part of the lake's bay near the museum had disappeared. It's not a great example, but the first picture shows how the bay appeared yesterday and second shows what the bay normally looks like in May. Ugh. Low lake levels are so ugly!

I worry that this early spring will have totally ruined this year's maple syrup production. I worry about how the wildlife and flora will respond to this odd weather. I worry . . . .

I feel like the opposite of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Rather than running around murmuring "I'm late, I'm late," I'm surveying the world around me and murmuring "Too early, too early."

Of course, I won't be terribly sad if this early spring means an extended growing season. The cold frame looked so sad and lonely in this warm weather that I just had to plant something in it. (Apparently I couldn't content myself with re-potting houseplants. I am happy this warm weather gave me an opportunity to repot a very root-bound rosemary plant out on the deck.) I sprinkled some "spring mix" lettuce seeds in a pot, watered it and put it in the cold frame. I won't be terribly upset if it suddenly grows cold again and the lettuce doesn't sprout. In fact, it may be a bit of a trick just for me to remember to water it. After all, it's not even spring yet.

Has it been unusually warm where you are? What's your favorite thing to do in the spring?

 

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