This week has gone by quickly. The weather has been sufficiently crappy that we can be relatively content working indoors with just one daily walk. We’ve been eating some of our dried, canned, and frozen foods.

sage and mustard seed

ground cherries are sweeter than ever

The dried beans, in particular, have been great. I didn’t even realize I was craving them until we cooked a bunch up and I keep sneaking a few, cold out of the fridge.

The popcorn, too, has dried properly and now pops like popcorn should in our fancy Whirley-pop pot.

We’re still eating tomatoes and tomatillos we picked green before the last frost. We make a new batch of fresh salsa every couple of days. I have to admit, though, they don’t taste as good as they do in July.

With the help of a light on a timer that goes on for a few hours in the evening and morning, the chickens are back on track, laying a reasonable number of eggs (4-6 per day, up from 0-2 during the worst of the molt). We haven’t accumulated quite enough to want to sell many to the neighbors, but we’re not rationing them out at breakfast, either.

In the woods, the witch hazels are still blooming abundantly. We took a hike up into Satan’s Kingdom to discover this pretty scene.

In the hoop house, I planted some more spinach and Swiss chard, as well as transplanting some lettuce from the little plastic boxes into the ground. I put the now-empty boxes over them to form a sort of second greenhouse to try to retain additional heat and moisture since my first transplants all disappeared into death and nothingness.

It has been relatively chilly, with a few snow flurries, and this afternoon I noticed that some of our exposed soil is displaying ice needles, a neat phenomenon of capillary action which causes the soil to heave in little pillars.

Time to put on my snow tires, I guess. And keep cutting firewood. And cuddle up next to the stove to get some work on knitting projects done.