A Bit Late

I’m a few hours late getting this post up, but it’s been a gray, dreary week or so here in the mid-Atlantic, and its been hard to get the motivation to do much of anything at all.

That being said, we’ve been prepping the garden for the coming spring; we’re in the process of replacing our wooden raised beds with cement blocks. The wood was fine for a few seasons, but inevitably started to rot out. We’re pouring our own modular blocks (similar in some ways to making life-sized building blocks), and the results are both aesthetically pleasing and sure to last much longer than the wood. They have the added benefit of being a bit taller than the wooden ones, which will help to keep the dogs from tramping through them…

Our “temporary” greenhouse is also up, and we intend to rig it with heaters for the cool nights, and fans to keep the air moving; I believe we’re going to be starting some of our seeds in the next week or two. This is a temporary solution, because the longer-term solution involves building a greenhouse structure where we’ve placed the temporary one. It’s in the chicken run, beside the coop, and flush against the west side of the barn. If anything, it might get too hot in the summer for anything, but that’s the nature of greenhouses.

Most of my beehives appear to have survived the winter; I had actually anticipated one more dying than actually did. I had six last summer; I figured two or three wouldn’t make it, for one reason or another. As I write this, I’ve got five–but one of them is just hanging on by a thread, so my prediction might end up having been spot-on. I’ve seen one dandelion in the fields; they’re normally the “starting gun” for the bees to begin. I’m also watching the various bushes and shrubs bud out and prepare to leaf and bloom.

One thing I’ve done this year that I hadn’t in previous years is make cuttings of my elderberry bushes, with the intention of planting more. The cuttings (maybe 15 or 20 of them) appear to be doing quite well, and I plan to transplant them in mid- to late-April. I also took some of the “less attractive” cuttings and put them along a berm we’ve built on the property (helping deflect run-off from the neighboring subdivision), just to see if any of them “take.” If so, that’s more plants, but if not, nothing really lost.

We have plans to start some pawpaw trees this year, as well. A neighbor has a few trees started, but they’re a couple of years from bearing; there are several trees down along the local riverbanks as well. We acquired seeds from three varietals last fall, and have been nursing them along, winterizing them. Hopefully, in five or so years, we can have a tasty late-summer treat.

We’ve also been discussing taking the household a little more “off-grid” this year. By this, I mean investing in a (professionally-installed) solar array. Unless we can find someone with an innovative solution, we’ll be fully grid-tied, meaning that in the event of a power outage, we’ll still be in the dark. (My wife doesn’t feel confident that we can arrange a full-house-power battery system right now; I’m hoping that the state of the art advances a little more in the next few years to make it really feasible.) Fortunately, we haven’t had an outage lasting more than a minute in the decade we’ve been here. Either way, it will ease (or, more likely, eliminate) our power bills, and give one more bit of resiliency.

That’s a fairly quick rundown of the current state of affairs here; how are things in your neck of the woods?