Garden, Day 1

I just got some of the seeds to start our garden today!  Adam is doing some bigger raised beds in the yard for vegetables so all the planters on the deck belong to my peppers.  Which is why most of those labels are for things that ought to be lethal.  I don't even like hot peppers, but I love making salsa and giving away pickled peppers.  So this year we're going with the hottest of the hots: Ghosts, Scorpions and Carolina Reapers.  There are also a lot of herbs used in Roman cooking because we're in an SCA household with friends and I want to recreate some Roman sausage recipes for Pennsic this year.  And chickpeas and purple tomatoes and black corn, which supposedly will make blue cornmeal.

The next step is to wrap each type of pepper's seeds in a damp paper towel and then let them germinate in a ziploc bag at about 85 degrees for at least the next ten days.  Then we'll be ready to start planting in the seedling starter.  The other plants, including a ton of (non purple) tomato seeds, will be planted at the same time.

The farm side of the mill

It's just about the second anniversary of the fiber mill's open house.  It feels like yesterday.  In these two years, Adam went from part time at home to finally coming home full time last August.  It makes the mill's production schedule much easier, but it also affords us a bit more time to focus on the farm, which was the reason we did all this in the first place.

It's hard to think of sunshine and gardens when it was -28 the other day.  No lie.  -28 with the windchill.  Our furnace couldn't keep up so the house was really chilly.  Even the newfoundland didn't want to lay on the tile, the floor was so cold.  But we're trying to start planning all the things we want to do on the farm now.  Unfortunately, with Adam not being home full time until mid-August, we missed all of last spring and summer.  This year, we're starting early.  So I'm hoping to finally start updating the blog with some interesting farm-y stuff (and cute pictures of yaks, because there's some new ones out there!)  And some knitting and mill stuff too, as the new yarns for the summer festivals start coming out.

So the first farm project update is...bees!  We ordered our package of bees yesterday.  They'll be picked up in Wilkes-Barre in mid-April.  Apparently, this is a thing that people do- drive in a car with a box of bees.  It seems a little terrifying, but I haven't heard of a lot of box-of-bees induced car wrecks on the news, so I'm assuming it goes better than it sounds.  For Christmas I got Adam a complete beginners kit that had everything he needs to get started, except the bees.  Probably for the best; I'm not sure how I'd wrap the bees.  We've been home brewing mead for a long time, and beekeeping seemed like a natural next step.  This is a project he's been talking about for years, so we're really excited to finally get started on this adventure.