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. 

Brown Sugar

Who knew that it is this easy to make your very own brown sugar?! I have not used store bought brown sugar for years just because for me this is easier.

1 Cup of white sugar

1 Tablespoon molasses

Start mixing, at first it seams like this will never turn into brown sugar.

Keep mixing and you start feeling better about it.

Then BAM!! Brown sugar

             This                                      makes                               this! 

I buy white sugar in bulk then divide it into containers (like milk jugs) if you were wondering "what's with the milk?" :)

Spring!

Glenn and I agree that this spring has been the most appreciated spring of our lifetime. Although we are always happy when spring is here and the long winter is coming to an end, this year really does seem even more loved than before. Glenn thinks it's just because we have never had to start a fire instead of push buttons on a thermostat, but for me having a wood stove is what I enjoyed most from our first winter off the grid. It made it sooo cozy and the oven and stove top was always ready to use, that was nice!
I just feel relieved for my chickens sake! I know that the girls are supposed to be able to just deal with the cold, but my goodness I worried about them when I knew the temp would drop really low at night. Now the future is warm and I will probably worry they are too hot :)
 We have been outside alot and loving it. There is sooooo much to do that it was difficult to decide where to start.

We decided to get our property line trail blazed.

So it went from looking something like this

to something more like this! 

We were already starting to notice crazy amounts of mosquitoes and we knew that we had to complete out tire flipping task before the rain came. So we did some fun tire flipping. 

Then we stacked them next to the last pile we did and then sealed them all up with a tarp. 

The rains came and our wet weather creek was flowing and beautiful.  

The ground was nice and soggy after all the rain, so we decided it was a good time to dig some holes for the goat fence we need to have ready by July!

We used an old telephone pole for some of the fence posts.

Glenn had to cut them to the size we needed.

Then we just tamped in the dirt around them.

We added an old tractor tire inside the goat run, hopefully the goats will like jumping on it. 

So far we ran about 100 feet of fencing around our set posts and T posts, 

we still have another 100 to go and a few more holes to dig. 

I keep my eye out for morel mushrooms, they could be coming up any day now...

Happy Spring!!!

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Tires, Tires Everywhere!

When building an earthship, one must accumulate lots of tires. We have done an excellent job at this, and we have also notice some of the down sides of having piles of tires everywhere. 

          No, the neighbors don’t mind the eye sore, it’s all the mosquitoes! Yep, a tire is the perfect place for a little puddle of water to rest and become a breeding ground for lots of mosquitoes, multiply that by a ton of tires and you have yourself a mosquito epidemic! We roughed through this past summer with a very high volume of the blood suckers and knew we had to get the tires wrapped up and out of the rain.

          If you have ever had the pleasure of trying to get stagnant water out of a tire, then you are well aware of the nasty smelly outcome, and I commend you for your efforts. The best way that we found (up until freezing temperatures) is to flip the tire quickly so that the water is at the top of the tire when the bottom tread of the tire hits the ground, the water will splash out. But… you also want to make sure that the tire lands on a bit of a diagonal, so the water doesn’t just fall into the bottom of the tire. Anyhow, the sewage smelling water will violently splatter everywhere no matter your tire flipping expertise. Glenn is pretty experienced and still ends up with mucky water splattered on him, and I feel like I have practically bathed myself in a tire by the time we are done.

So, Glenn had the amazing idea to get the water out of the tires while everything was frozen, 

and get the whole pile stacked and covered again. It worked out perfectly! 

Instead of flipping the tires, Glenn used and ax and I used a hammer 

and we just hit the outside of the tire and the chunk of ice would pop out! 

It was kind of like a large version of a silicone ice cube tray,

 only instead of silicone, it is a tire, and instead of ice its swampy-ness...

 but you can even see the grooves from the inside of the tire on the ice we popped out.

 I found a resilient and frozen little mushroom in the pile of tires.

The finished product!

We still have more tires exposed to the elements but we are not going to worry about them

 because we plan to be packing them full of dirt this spring!  

There have been some bitter cold days and then we get a break and can dig in the dirt and enjoy nice “warm” days too, so on one of the warmer days we made a cold frame for later this spring when I have some seedlings ready for them. We used a heavy old glass sliding door (thanks Nancy!). 

I will just slide a tray or two of seedlings in there and plug up the end 

with a piece of foam or something. I will let you know how it works out.

Glenn got to work on skinning a cedar post that he installed

 as part of the upstairs railing in the cabin. 

The current state of our upstairs railing, has a ways to go. 

Enjoy your week and stay warm! 

My love of Valentine's Day

Yes, it's true, this is my favorite holiday! I know there are a lot of people out there that don't like this holiday very much, but for me, it's not a holiday about just couples, it's simply a holiday about love and sharing the love that you have for your family, friends, significant other, and really just about anyone. The week of Valentine's day is also Random Act's of Kindness Week, how fun! While I was working the 9-5, this was my all-time favorite week to plan for, and now that I'm working at home... well it's still my all-time favorite week to plan for.

   Here is a random act of kindness that Prairie Farms is doing through their campaign "Our Caps Your Cause" just in case you do purchase their brand of milk. For the longest time I had no idea they  donate $0.05 for each code that is redeemed from under the milk cap to the charity of your choice. So, this morning I redeemed the stash of lids I was collecting.

Since we recycle, I am already washing out the milk jug once its empty, so it's really easy to wash the cap along with it and toss it into a drawer until I'm ready to get on line and enter in a bunch at a time.

When your ready to enter your cap code go to PrairieFarms.com and click on "our caps your cause". 

Then peel back the top label on the milk cap to reveal your code.

You can enter 5 cap codes at a time that will go to whatever charity you choose. There are a TON of charities and I think more are added every day so I suggest choosing your charity first. You can decide what type of charity you want (food pantry, education, service groups, animal rescue etc.) to donate to and click on that type and search for a specific location by using the right column options. 

 I am partial to donating to food pantries and sometimes to lions clubs, 

but any organization is a good one! 

Once they are all entered, you can toss the caps into the recycle bin, and be happy that a big corporation is giving back to their community. Yeah, it's only a small amount of money, but every little bit adds up, there has already been 10,000 donated to charities from Prairie Farms through this event! 

For the girls this morning I gave them the rest of the wheat grass that I had been growing for them. They liked it. 

Mr. Roo thought that the shinny camera may be something good to eat too. 

This morning I was thinking about what I wanted to share about the things I love about our new lifestyle, but if I would do that the list would just go on and on forever and ever. Instead, I decided to share the one thing I thought I would really have an issue getting use to, 

and it turned out to be something that I kind of love.  

Yeah, it's our cute little outhouse! 

 First I love the whimsical look of the cute thing, and the stained glass window

and the huge picture window. 

The view from the inside. 

I also really appreciate the dry toilet method of no water, no sewage and the smell of sawdust!

Have a happy Valentine's Day!!!