Spring is coming

This can be more ominous than the infamous 'winter is coming' line if you're going to give food production a try for the first time.

So what have we been doing through our snowy winter?  I've been in hibernation, which is why I haven't been writing anything.  I don't like winter much.  I need sunlight in order to function.  And coffee.  Joe's been doing snow removal.  Lots and lots of snow removal.   We're on winter storm three for the past seven days, looking at about another 8 inches of snow.  He's had to snow plow a series of paths so we can get the dogs outside and let them run.  We can't even see Peyton's tail when she's running through the paths.  We call them the hamster tunnels.

Hamster tunnels

When we're not hauling the frozen nemesis away (okay, watching Joe haul the frozen nemesis away), we're planning for spring.  More accurately, I'm planning and shopping for spring.  Joe's staring at my seed lists with a look similar to a deer in the headlights.  I don't even know how many kinds of seeds I have anymore.  But I have more coming!  We've got all of the old standards (carrots, tomatoes, lettuce), some odd additions (ghost peppers, anyone?), and an entire garden's worth of herbs.  I've even got some unusual herbs coming to double as ground cover on our slopes.  I've never heard of sweet woodruff, but it's supposed to smell like vanilla, likes shade, and offers ground cover.  Good enough for me!  Our plan for this year is to stick a bunch of things in the ground and see if anything grows.  The plan of fools.

We've also ordered up our first round of chickens.  25 little balls of fluff are showing up at the beginning of March.  Six of them will be our layer flock, the other nineteen will eventually be heading to 'freezer camp'.  If this goes well, we'll keep doing it.  If it doesn't?  Well, it's only 12 weeks from arrival to eating size, so we can suffer that long.  Joe's hard at work planning out chicken tractors.  I'm just doing the shopping.  Seeing a theme?

 I'm supposed to be tapping the maple trees this week, but Mother Nature has decided I should wait a bit longer.  We're not getting above freezing during the day right now and it's freaking snowing.  Again.  I think I'll be out tapping trees this weekend, assuming I can get to them. 

On the bright side, our property looks gorgeous in the snow.

 The view from my office

  The path to the creek, which is frozen over