Birthday Sunrise

As a child, I didn't like having my birthday and Christmas so close together. Once January 5 was over, it was such a long time to wait until all the excitement  rolled around again. But this year I'm glad to start two new years in one week.

2014 was not an easy year. Three hospitalizations and long recoveries, the final one causing us to miss our trip to New Mexico. For the first time in my life, I wasn't sitting around my parents' cozy stone fireplace with my brothers and their families for Christmas. That was hard for all of us. And yet it was a good year in many ways. I found out how much kindness and love there is among my family and friends. The deep well of prayer and generosity that surrounds our little family of three. I learned to be grateful for small things, to wake up and slow down and notice fleeting moments. I woke up to this birthday sunrise this morning.

The first pic I took with my camera, pulling on snowboots and D's heavy parka and scrambling to keep Charlie inside because it was early and he would bark and wake the neighbors. The grainy iPad shot above is what I saw from our bedroom window as soon as I opened my eyes. I spent a lot of time watching this tree from my bed this year. From green summer, to fall leaves turning and dropping their giant beanpods all over the grass. Then my favorite season, when snow falls softly on the black branches and blurs the edges of the pergola.

It made me laugh when the maudlin O. Henry story The Last Leaf popped into my head, where the girl watches the tree from her sickbed and predicts she will be dead when the last leaf falls. This is not a Last Leaf situation. It was a crisis that's over now. There shouldn't be any long term effects once I recover and get my stamina back. (It was gynecological, that led to pulmonary embolism---multiple blood clots on both lungs---that in turn led to profound anemia and more complications. All fixable with surgery, which is over now. No cancer or permanent damage to my heart and lungs, nothing chronic.) I was fortunate, and I won't forget that. I had been taking my good health for granted for many years.

We met another curve ball in October, when R was diagnosed with celiac disease. Again, we have been so spoiled with her good health. She's almost never at the doctor. But she had been kind of languishing since early summer. Strange symptoms, just not her rosy-cheeked, energetic and thriving self. I took her in a few times and all her bloodwork came back normal. Then they thought to test for celiac. We were surprised when she was diagnosed, but grateful to have an explanation.

I'd like to start the blog back up with a focus on gluten free recipes, and what we're learning about living with celiac. Overall it's been a good thing, an answer to our questions and a concrete way to get R back on the road back to feeling good. The improvement was dramatic once we cut out gluten. It's been interesting to learn a new way to cook. We're still homeschooling, and loving it. It's a different season of our lives, with an 11 year old instead of a little girl. I think there is a blog for that.

For today, it's a birthday I'm grateful to be celebrating, with my patient family who has put way too many things on the back burner for too long. This morning the sky exploded in color behind the tree that kept me company through those long, restless months. You don't have to look much farther for a sign that 2015 will be a different year. God is good, and we are happy.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Here is an old Irish blessing for each of you:
May the blessing of light be on you
light without and light within.
May the blessed sunlight shine on you
and warm your heart
till it glows like a great peat fire.

 Tonight we had corned beef; carrots, turnips and apples glazed with apple cider; colcannon with cabbage, potatoes, spinach and scallions; and Irish soda bread. And Guinness of course.

One more blessing for good measure. This one was on the favors at our wedding:
Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you.

Homeschool Sick Day

102 fever for two days, poor kid. This is one of the great perks of homeschooling. Snow keeps coming down outside, I don't have to drive anywhere, no worries about missing schoolwork and having hours of make-up homework when she goes back. She's been reading a lot and even did some math online. But mostly sleeping and listening to me read Emma to her.

March Seedling Progress

Here is some of the progress since I started the first seeds on February 14.

The artichokes are up! Some of them. They are pretty tricky to germinate. The cardoons keep coming and everything looks  strong and healthy.

Leeks are just poking up. 

Salad greens, kale and broccoli varieties are getting ready to go out in the garden under frost cover, and free up space under the lights for the next round: peppers and eggplants.

Spinach (Bordeaux and regular green) and cabbages in the sunny front windowsill.

I'm trying to sprout sweet potatoes for the ornamental vines. If it works, I can transplant the slips when they grow out the top of the potatoes, root them in water, and have enough for my containers and a few for the flowerbeds. Next to them is Red Russian kale.

Seed Starting 2014

If my artichokes and cardoons germinate and make it out to the garden, I will be so happy. So far only the cardoons have sprouted, after 8 days in the most perfect indoor conditions I could figure out after a lot of reading.

I have 15 wintersow jugs outside with perennials and frost-hardy annuals. I learned a hard lesson the last few years. Most things germinate and grow amazingly well in their little greenhouses, but rabbits mow down all the work -- seeding, waiting/watering for months and then transplanting from the jugs -- in one day. The places I most need flowers can't be fenced. This might be a year of container gardening for a lot of things.

Mixed orach from Baker Creek. It's so ornamental I was hoping to use it as an accent plant, but it's an edible green like spinach. The seedlings glow like Bright Lights Swiss Chard.

R switched her room with the guest room this year, so her old room is now the seedling room. I put some salad greens in seed pots, but the soil blocks are working well for everything else. Alyssum dries out and dies in the micro seed blocks, even though I water it three times a day. It's on heat mats with the petunias, which are sprouting faster than I've ever seen them with this setup. Alyssum needs another plan though. It's one of the few things that survives the conditions of our front yard flower beds, so it's worth trying again. The front windowsill has cool-germinating cole crops like broccoli and cauliflower, and kales and leeks, and they are all going to town. I learned that the secret to spinach is to germinate it in damp paper towels first.

We bought a pressurized garden sprayer this year, and it's even better than I expected for seedling watering. A perfect fine spray from a wand that you can target exactly where it needs to go, even to the far back rows of trays. I used to use a little spray bottle to mist seedlings, and my wrist would fall off after a few trays. You can't fit watering cans with big roses under the lights, and the other options would drown seedlings or leave corners dry. Now I have to make sure I'm not enthusiastically watering so much that my seeds damp off, because it's so fun and easy. It's a great investment, because once the garden is up and running, we can use the sprayer for compost tea, fish emulsion and foliar feeding, and organic bug spray. (Concoctions with Murphy's Oil soap and cayenne pepper.)

A lot of optimism in early March, when the seeding has been going along for a few weeks and things are popping up. The hard part is once the plants actually get outside in our harsh Colorado conditions. Drought and prolonged extreme heat and rabbits and bindweed, late spring and summer hail storms, it has been a rough few years lately for the garden. It's been a dry winter, so this doesn't promise to be the kind of spring that gets us off to a good start. I keep learning though, and trying again.

February Chickens

Everyone enjoyed some time outside today, before the next cold front and snow comes in tonight.

Obsessively herding his chickens is the only thing we've every found that tires Charlie out. This is all of them, except for Stellaluna, our Black Australorp, who has gone broody and was back in the coop sitting on some eggs. From the left is Egglantine, the Black Cochin; Fialka, the Ameraucana; Colette, the Buff Orpington; Fialka's sister Cricket, also an Ameraucana (they are the ones that lay blue/green eggs;) Marigold the Light Brahma; and Felicity the Cuckoo Maran.

It was a gorgeous, warm day. The ladies got in a lot of dust baths.

Don't look Charlie in the eye unless you have a clear conscience. He is very good at ferreting out disobedient thoughts in his hens.

Marigold is the cuddliest. She knows how to open the screen door with her beak, and tries to come in the house.She will follow you around chuckling at you until you pick her up.

I'm so proud of our hardy chicken girls, making it through stretches of below zero temperatures this winter without any problems. We've gotten kind of attached to them.

Sweet Peas

One year not too long ago, we had sweet peas in the front yard garden that looked like this.

They were started from seed indoors and planted out as seedlings. In the years following, I direct-seeded them, and hardly any even bloomed.

This year I want them to be spilling over the fence again, so I'm going back to the space and labor-intensive method and starting them from seed. Here they are after soaking and scarifying with a nail clipper, in their soil blocks before being covered with the top layer of soil.

I'm trying these for the first time, soil block makers for seedlings. The idea is that there are no plastic pots to buy /save/sterilize, more room for seedlings in each flat, and stronger seedlings that survive transplanting. I'm excited about using the micro blocks when it's time to plant basil and other plants that need heat to germinate. Heat mat real estate is so precious, and this should quadruple how many seedlings I can start on heat. The roots air prune, which means they reach the end of their blocks and stop growing, rather than circling around the pots. You can see how that would help with transplant shock. Eliot Coleman popularized this European method in the states. I'm diligent about saving and re-using the little black plastic seedling pots, but they eventually crack and give out, and this year mine all seem to be falling apart at the same time. So it's a great time to try something different.

I bought two sizes of block makers. The 3/4" mini blocks, and the larger 2" blocks that the minis can be potted up into once the seedlings are growing.

You fill and compact the block molds with soil, press down the plunger, and end up with perfect square blocks of soil ready for planting. There are different-sized dowel pin inserts that can be customized to make a hole just the right size for your seed. There is a special recipe for the soil block mix, because regular seedling mix won't hold together in the blocks. I think the micro might be too small for seeds as big as sweet peas, but I'm planting so many seeds that it's important to save space, so I'm giving it a try. I did one batch in the 2" blocks as a test, to see if those grow faster than the ones that start small and are potted up. Maybe one day I'll invest in root trainers, like Matt Matus in his Growing With Plants blog. His blog is so beautiful and well-written, and such an inspiration. Here's to a glorious fence-full of sweet peas again, if everything goes well.