Spring Sprung

Spring arrives in fits and starts. Last weekend's Easter Sunday hit 65 sunny degrees. This Sunday's forecast is for 28 degrees with colder windchills. Still, the crocuses tell me that spring is undoubtedly here.

Fresh Start

It's been almost a year since I last posted. Last June we had a house fire that displaced us for the entire summer and into the fall. Our gardens were among the many things that suffered during those months we spent away at an apartment.

I missed the gardens, and my gardening tremendously. At first we tried to keep up, visiting on weekends or in the evenings to weed and replant, and thin and water. After a while it became too much - we had so much extra work and worry going on that the gardens had to take a back seat.

But it was a heartache to watch the weeds grow and to pick fruit, flowers and vegetables from the wild overgrowth.

Now that we're back home, I'm anticipating spring even more fervently than usual. I can't wait to be out in the beds, weeding and watching them grow day-by-day. We lost much of our gardening supplies in the fire because the greatest damage happened in our back porch storage where we kept the tools, extra seeds and even our grow light. We salvaged some, and have replaced some, but in many ways we are starting over.

So, as I watch our seedlings come up this year, they seem to refill a hole in my heart. There is always spring, always new growth, even out of ashes.

Chickens!

This spring we adopted a small batch of chicks - a somewhat unexpected addition to our small family. We've toyed with the idea of backyard chickens before, but when we discovered the local co-op had unclaimed chicks, we just went for it.

This will be a learning experience: We've already figured out some basics, but are still researching, gathering advice and generally feeling our way along.

We got Comets, which seem to be an incredibly friendly and docile breed. It's either that or we are just chicken people at heart and O is some kind of natural chicken whisperer. They don't mind being petted and follow O around like he's a big hen.

Yesterday we finished the chicken pen and let the chicks outside for the first time. It was pretty neat to see them explore the yard - the outside world must seem like a pretty big (and windy, and bright, and loud) place.

Happily there are lots of great resources on the interwebs. Here's one I've been looking at recently. I'm sure I'll share more as our chicken-raising careers progress.

Squash Seedlings

We got most of our garden in early this year, thanks to some hot weather in the first weeks of May. Tomatoes, peppers, onions, beets, corn, lettuce, broccoli and brussels sprouts. That left out the vining plants, cukes and squash. Here are those babies now, just about ready to get transplanted. We will see whether the early weeks in the ground jump started our season ... or if Vermont's season is impossible to lengthen. The latter is my guess.