Spring has sprung!!

Jason is outside working on the seed cage project - the hope is to wrap it up soon so that we can get peas planted inside it (the goal is to have a chipmunk/squirrel/grasshopper-free place to grow some of the seeds that are most tempting for certain critters). And the girls are enjoying time with family in PA! They left yesterday on a fun road trip north and will get to hang out with cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents for a few days!! That means the house is quiet! I've made a verbal commitment to a few friends that I will carve out some of the next day or two to hole up with my journal. So that's up next after sharing some spring images and snippets here. 

I did chores this morning and sloshed my way through various places on the land. We've had A LOT of rain since we did our spring planting. I was excited to see the lettuce sprouting. I also made the first batch of apple mint tea to have alongside sautéed winter cress for breakfast. Green is popping out more or less everywhere. Of all the animals, I most enjoyed tending the chicks that we booted out from the house when they started exploring beyond the bounds of the kiddie pool. 

We had three good weather days recently before the predicted rains where we worked all together to get the spring gardens in. Those were the best 3 days I've had in a really long time. It was so good to be outside working together. We did so much seeding, planting, mulching, watering, weeding, transplanting, alongside a lot of laughing and talking. I was able to mostly mentally table everything else for those few days which is a monumental feat for me. There were some moments where it was iffy if we were going to meet our goal for the day (for example, get the potatoes in before dark). But we made a good team and accomplished more than we even set out to in those few days (we'll credit that by and large to kids getting older and more helpful)!! 

We did take breaks and this one was a picnic in Terah's turtle shell playhouse. The willows are slowly turning the roof green!

Alida and Terah would get tired of various jobs pretty quickly, but they were normally open to selecting something else helpful from a menu of options - they seemed to really enjoy filling wheelbarrows with leaves for mulching. 

I really do love the combination of shades of greens and browns - the leaf mulch on paths with a layer of compost on the beds is truly a beautiful sight for my eyes. 

Jason did the hard work of digging all the potato trenches. Then the rest of us helped putting the seam of bio char in, some soil over that, planting potatoes and then covering them. It feels like this year Terah is exponentially expanding the number of things she can do in the garden.

All the baby shallot and onion plants are in and looking pretty happy. I was worried the recent rains might have been too much for them, but the onion patch, especially, looked quite perky this morning.

In addition to planting potatoes, shallots and onions, we also seeded cilantro, lettuce, beets and dill. We also did a lot of weeding and path work (scooping soil from paths onto beds and applying fresh leaf mulch to the paths). Additionally, once the biochar pit was emptied we raked and scooped up all the duff from the bottom of the old brush pile to fill in the pit. It was a cascade of projects, all the more fun when done together. Here's a few other pictures from those days...

In other non-garden news, but still in the vein of things growing: Terah has lost her 4th tooth. And our trip to the dentist the other day for cleanings confirmed that she has a few more loose. She's not wasting any time!! She is enjoying what foods she can stick in through the hole.

My heart had its best kind of therapy the other night when Jonathan, Christen and Luca came over for dinner. After he had had his (several) dinners, he sacked out on my chest. There's nothing like it!!!

Since both Terah and Alida had gotten a chance to hold and feed him, they even let me hold him without asking for turns. Or maybe they could just see how blissfully content their mama was and didn't want to end that time prematurely. Whatever the reasons were, I was grateful!

It's so amazing how a little person can reorient our social spaces. He is literally the center of attention in some moments. :) He's becoming much more alert and curious about the world around him, and his smiles and little coos are something else!

And, yes, I was having a little bit of a hard time giving him up at the end of the evening!

Here's to hoping that each of you reading this have the kind of love, accompaniment, nourishment, tending, challenge and gentleness you need in your life to inspire your own growth and blooming!