Update Coming soon!

Hi friends and family! Even though I have not been posting, we have been accomplishing all sorts of fun things this summer! I have decided to only blog on rainy days or days too cold to be outside, and this summer we have had none of those... but it is starting to get cooler, so I'm guessing I will be inside chilling in front of the wood stove before long, with a pile of updates to add!  Thanks for all your encouragement and support! Hope you stop back by in a month or two :)

Wow! Over 1,000 visits to this blog!

This is mind blowing! When I log in I can see the total number of page views in the form of a nifty little graph and today it caught my eye to see 1,005 page views! I started blogging last August, so thank you to everyone who came to visit and one by one totaled over 1,000 views!
  The big picture for me has always been to share our unique story, help document our progress, and help us not forget where we started. I have never been a good writer, even though I do enjoy it and I love love love to take pictures, so if you are anything like me... maybe you should start a blog too, after all we all have our own unique story.

The wood shed

We realized pretty quickly that the wood shed that Glenn originally build was not big enough for us, so he started building on to it, now our wood cutting, splitting, stacking and storing can continue!

This front portion is what he originally built, and we were both thinking that we would be able to stack the pile really high. Realistically it's just not a safe idea, so the stack you see is about as high as we stacked over the winter. 

The unfinished roof and the flooring under it is the "new" side of the wood storage. 

We already started stacking some wood in the back corner of the new side

Glenn is finishing up the roofing for the extended wood shed

It will be a lot of work to fill this puppy now! 

Happy wood splitting! 

Gardening

It has been slow going in the gardening department. I had a garden all dug up and fenced off before we moved here, but it just wasn't getting enough sun, and the soil is so rocky and mostly clay that it just didn't work well. So, after many conversations with Glenn about where the best location for a raised bed would be... well there really was no good spot because it was either in the way or it wouldn't get enough sun. Possible solution is to begin to terrace the east facing bluff for a garden, this would be good for more than just having a garden, but it would also help us clear and keep it cleared enough to be able to see the river throughout the summer when normally it gets too overgrown. So this is our test terrace, if it does well this summer, I will continue digging and maybe in a few years I will actually have a substantial garden to talk about.

I just started digging, see the river way down there?

Of course Mojo helped me

Instead of "digging" I should describe is as "prying rocks" because that is a better description

 This was my view, the trees across the river are just starting to bud

Then Glenn helped me line it with hardware cloth and put a drain pipe in it,

 and he added the rocks for a good solid edge. 

Here are the tomato plants that Mamma G(THANK U!) grew for us, freshly transplanted

 They should be very happy tomatoes with a view like this!

The welded warrior that Glenn made, hopefully it can deter tomato horn worms...

Today is a special day!

Glenn and I don't celebrate our anniversary of the beginning of our relationship, but I think we will forever celebrate this day! It is the anniversary of ONE YEAR living off grid! We started off the day with a high five and reminisced about the many accomplishments that have occurred in just one short year. Yeah, that was our celebration... woohooo!  
 We could not be happier with how everything has worked out!

 Follow your dreams, talk about your dreams, visualize your life the way you want to be living it... soon you will find yourself living your dream... and what a wonderful feeling it is.

Wild Sweet William

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Wood Sorrel

Now it looks more like spring!

My post in March about spring being here... looked pretty sad, and I see that now plain as day but when I posted it I was overcome with the excitement of warm sunny days and walking upon a soft mushy mother earth. Since then I have tightly embraced the beauty of each flower, sprig of grass, wild onion and tree blossom that I see. To see the transformation happening right before my eyes is something that seems magical, and fairy-like... love it!
   There are things in the woods that I actually recognize as a young little sprout and can tell you what it is, but there are about a bajillion more that I am adding to my "hmm, need to figure out what this is" section of my brain. Any type of improvement is good in my opinion, and so my journey to be a wise old woodsy woman has just begun!

The first actual tree to flower was not the dogwood... I always thought the dogwood was the first. This tree is called the serviceberry tree and these are the beautiful white flowers that bloom.

 There berries are said to be edible, but I think we will leave ours for the birds for now. 

The flowers fade before the dogwoods started to bloom. 

 The forsythia's were blooming at the same time, so we noticed some yellow and white blooms through the woods, it was nice. They have lost their beautiful flowers not too. 

This is a photo progression of the adorable little mayapples this is from the very beginning of April through the last week in April. Not the same one, just pics I got throughout the month.

I may have had too much fun taking pictures of these cute things, but they grow sooo fast, and now their little villages have set up camp throughout the woods, The fairies must be thrilled. 

Ok, so back on track, the bloodroot plant was actually already at this stage while the mayapple was just starting to poke through the ground.

Those veins on the back of the bloodroot leaf are pretty cool.  

 In just a few days these are all over, now in late April, I haven't notices any more flower,

 just the nice big leaves, one leaf per plant. 

 

Oh the beautiful trout lily. She came up very early April as well. 

Her trout looking leaf is edible, tasty too, I have only nibbled on one if the plant has two to offer, because these are just too pretty to eat up. 

How precious is this? 

And last but certainly not least is the spring beauty. All parts are edible raw, but it is suggested to cook the corm (root ball) so its more palatable. 

These are up just as fast as the trout lily and blood root. 

 Even though these are too beautiful to eat too, I decided to try one because we do have a ton of them growing everywhere, and I was curious, and hungry. 

 This is the corm (aka fairy spud). 

You peal it and then its best to cook it,

 but I'm not cooking this one little thing, so I just tried it raw. 

 

Kinda tasted like a raw potato, so fairy spud is the perfect name.