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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