I’ve been working on the beehive for the last week and a half. It takes an incredible quantity of nails – and of course I’m overengineering it by carefully assembling and glueing all the parts first. It’s a little added strength and longevity, and it does keep the parts straight and square while I nail […]
Since I had to make spaghetti sauce for this weekend’s lasagne anyway, I decided to go ahead and make a huge batch and save time and trouble later. With just four of Costco’s 64 oz cans, I think I’ve made enough spaghetti sauce to tide us through the four long months until tomato season. The […]
(cue sarcastic chortles) I’d really like to transform our den. Right now it’s just fine, standard, quite dated but absolutely serviceable. I’m not elated about the wood paneling or the carpet color, but they’re not killing anyone. (Wow, it’s amazing how much bigger it looked before we moved in all our furniture.) I’ve always wanted […]
More progress on the farm this weekend: I’ve filled in another path and another bed. One rugosa rose goes up by the entrance – see its tiny green there in the lower left-hand corner? – and another got planted over by the grapes. I haven’t chosen any spots for the remaining 3, but I suppose […]
I’m still working on that table I found on Freecycle. Remember what it looked like before? And this is what it looked like a couple days ago: I sanded off much of the dark gloss finish before I figured out that the surface is in fact a veneer – tiger oak, an expert friend tells […]
I got a call today saying they’d come in…. And here they are! Seven little puffballs so small you could line them up in an egg carton. This one’s already a sassy-pants, I can tell. Check out that cheeky look she’s giving me. I got two black-n-white Barred Rocks (for egg reliability), two brownish Americauna […]
Sofía at 20 months. I finally caught it on video. (Click on it to go to the YouTube site to see it larger.) Actually I’m a little grumpy about the video. Sofía sang the ABC’s over and over about five or six times, all of them with the little song at the end, and I […]
This is going soooooo sloooooowly. Yesterday I planted 20 asparagus and 1 rhubarb. Today I planted 6 asiatic lilies, 1 sugar maple, and 2 blueberries. I hauled one 9-foot log, aerated a 20’x4′ bed (with a pitchfork), and dumped and spread 42 cubic feet of topsoil and 30 cubic feet of wood chips. I also […]
9pm, and I just got in from planting three of five fruit trees. Earlier in the day I’d pulled them up from where I had them potted, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to re-plant and re-pull them tomorrow… so I knew I had to plant them tonight come hell or high […]
I really hate it when I buy beautiful glass-jarred candles that leave half the wax behind them when they finally burn out. It seems so wasteful – I want more candle from my candle. I found a pumpkin-scented candle at Target some time before Christmas. I loved the smell so much – like baking pumpkin […]