100 happy days :: day 9

finally. a day of sunshine and no wind. a real spring day. husband had a day off and we finally moved that row of asparagus that was way too close to the rhubarb. these are asparagus roots that we started from seed our second year here. how they're 4 years old and very substantial. we hope moving them won't have traumatized them too much and that they'll have a good season. dad had loads of asparagus in his garden and he was known for it all over town, so having a long row of healthy asparagus roots makes me feel very happy. i know that if he was able to see our project today, he was smiling.

the bees were very happy as well and the air was alive with their buzzing. there are plenty of crocus up and they were feeding greedily and cleaning out their hives. great to see that all four hives were buzzing (literally) with activity. we had a mild winter, so we expected them to be just fine, but it's nice to know it for sure.

molly loved that we were in the garden and obviously also loved the sunshine. she snoozed on a warm roof tile (it's part of a cover we put over our artichokes to keep them from being killed by the hard frosts. it was a perfect spot to relax in the sun.

today's happinesses. very simple, but somehow profound. spring is wonderful.

scenes from a weekend (warning: carnage ahead)

we awoke saturday morning at our leisure, only realizing later that it was because there was no annoying crowing from our rooster. that's because a fox appeared to have gotten him in the night. he'd been turning aggressive of late, to both me and the best cats, so i have to admit i don't feel that badly about it.

the feral hen (our one lone survivor from last summer's chicken rustlers) is just fine and so are her four babies (tho' this morning, there were only 3 and she wasn't telling why).

here's how bacon and bacon are doing these days. the bacon with the black spot on her side (she's on the right) took the hose from me soon after this and dragged it over to her mud pit all by herself. she's no dummy and we're thinking she wants to be our mama pig going forward. how can you dispute such intelligence?

we tried the strawberry shrub (it's strawberries cured in vinegar that you use, mixed with fizzy water, like a cordial) this weekend. it was brilliant and i made two more jars of it, plus bought cherries and made two jars of cherry shrub as well. it tastes old-fashioned in a very good way...like a cold black cherry soda from a dime pop machine in an implement dealership in a small town.

we decided our latest batch of bunnies are old enough to sell, so we had a little photo session. how cute are they? these are the batch we like to think of as the immaculate conception bunnies, as to our knowledge their mother was never with the buck.

sabin has totally got the hang of her personal cotton candy/candy floss machine. we like to call her the cotton candy/candy foss whisperer.

i spent several hours on saturday, picking these and more than two hulling them and preparing to make them into 11 jars of jam, two shrubs and four bottles of cordial.

i decided to make small jars, as they are more giftable and we eat them up better. when it's time for æbleskiver in december, these will come in very, very handy.

it was time for the first honey harvest today as well - 13 frames, 20 kilos. it's good to have honey for our tea once again.

it was a nice afternoon, so husband built a fire and we grilled some sausages. there's just something about food eaten outside, don't you think?

the little hen knows there's trouble afoot, so she coaxed her small children up into a tree with her, where the fox can't get them. she's no dummy, that hen.

we spent the evening building a bit of LEGO. i finished up my maersk triple e ship (photos coming soon in good light) and sabin built the LEGO Friends caravan. and then promptly crashed into the juice bar. as one does when one is playing with LEGO Friends outside of the normal age recommendations.

here's hoping you all had a blissful and fox-free weekend wherever you are.

making things and reading

i made soap yesterday. i took the easy route, buying a shea butter soap base at the craft store, but adding honey (from our own bees) and oatmeal and sprigs of lavender i picked last summer and dried. i'll make another run of it this evening at a "make things with honey" event at our local culture house. i'm also making all sorts of yummy honey-related things to eat. i convinced our local beekeeper's association to show people the wide variety of things you can make with honey! i love instigating such things. the soap was super easy and i'm going to tackle the more difficult cold process kind next time - using oils and lye and time. i like the idea of knowing exactly what's gone into the soap. husband wants me to get very ambitious and make shampoo as well. but one step at a time. he's done a marvelous job building a room that's made for such projects (he calls it the brewery), so once the sink is in out there, i will have a place to do such projects, conveniently located right next to the honey centrifuge.

thanks to faithful use of goodreads, i realized that i can manage to read at least 100 books before the year is out. my goodreads stands at 84, but i also did my annual reread of the harry potter series, so it's actually at 91. to round it out, i dug around in boxes and found my nabokov collection, as i've just read andrea pitzer's the secret history of vladimir nabokov and so i have a hankering to reread pale fire. the three hardbacks, i scored long ago in a used bookstore in scottsdale, arizona for a song. i've already delved into speak, memory, nabokov's autobiography, and i realized that tho' i've had it for years, i hadn't actually read it before now. i wonder how many more of those are on my shelves. maybe my goal for 2014 will be to read 100 books that i already own. most of this years reads have been from the library, as borrowing instead of buying fits my current lifestyle and philosophy much better anyway. tho' it remains hard for me not to write in the library's books. if i only read my own books, their loan rates are going to go down and we can't have that, so i guess it will have to be a mix.

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if you love JFK (and i do), you have to see this collection of photos in the atlantic.