Signs of Spring

Last week, the last batch of snow melted and the first yellow crocuses poked out of the ground. On Monday, the sun shone warm on the south side of the house, bringing out at least five lizards crawling all over the stone wall. On Tuesday, we saw a frog hopping into the pond. Pussy willows and primroses abound. New buds are just sprouting out of trees and bushes. The birds are coming to the feeders less now, spending their time finding homes and constructing nests instead of filling up with winter fuel. 

And what are we up to? Not updating our blog enough, that's for sure!

A couple of weeks of snow and particularly cold weather slowed down our plans a bit, and since it warmed up again we've been out doing so much stuff there's been little time for computering. We created some pretty cool water catchment systems, a few pretty simple ones and a more high-tech one, which you can see in our photos. We finally built a compost box (which everyone appreciated since we'd been keeping our compost in plastic bags in the kitchen). We've got lots of seedlings coming up, and a few plants already sprouting outside. The garden planning is coming along, but since the majority of our plants won't actually go out until late April/early May, we're not in too much of a rush to get the beds fixed up. One especially fun project was enlarging the chicken area, to give the chickens fresh grass, and to get them to get rid of it so we can plant in it! They love it, and it's amazing how fast the grass has turned from green to brown, and how it's disappearing (you can see the day-by-day progression starting here). And since they've had more grass and worms, we've had more eggs!

The room we've been working on renovating had some setbacks, mostly in that we realized we wouldn't be able to do cob walls in the cold (cob needs warmth to dry), and as there's no heating, it'll be another month or two until it warms up enough. So, after some research we decided to do a lime-and-hemp layer, which we will follow with a lime-earth-sand-and-pigment finishing layer. The lime-and-hemp is nice to work with, it goes on easily and quickly, it looks awesome, and the ingredients are relatively local (they're from France, at any rate). Still considering our options about the floor. And still hoping to integrate the dog hair and horse manure somehow.

We're going to try to update more... but it's hard to find time to spend on the computer with all these projects! Don't expect to hear from us in the next couple of weeks though, because we're off on a skiing holiday with the family, then up to stay with Chris's sister in the Loire Valley. We're hoping that by the time we get back, the spring showers will have filled our rain barrels, and the sun will be warming up our little corner of the earth a bit more than it has been.