Spring Growth

We had a long cold winter and I've finally had the chance to survey the gardens and some of the yard. It's hard to see how much we lost this past winter. Each winter we protect what we can and hope and pray for the rest; and each spring I get more discouraged.

One of the reasons we bought this property was so I could garden to my hearts content. It's not really working out so far. Today I'm choosing to see what is growing, rather than what's not.

Here's what I saw this morning on my slow hobble around some of our yard.

At least one of our apple trees is starting to bud.

I planted about 120 bulbs last year and so far I've only gotten a few flowers.

Our bleeding hearts are doing very well.

Another successful bulb.

A few of the lupins I grew from seed last winter made it through this one.

A random maple tree growing right in the middle of the flower bed!

Jon and I gave out trees at our wedding and this is one of the spruce trees - still going strong after almost 9 years!

This is Garrett, one of our gargoyles. He made it through his first winter outside. (I forgot to bring him in) :-( 

A couple of spring visitors - the one on the right looks a wee bit cranky!

A Road Trip and a Dutch Door

The first room you walk into when you come in our back door is a room we call "the back hallway". It was a utility room and bathroom when we first bought our place; but we quickly gut it because it was gross, (there's just no other way to say that, lol) and it remained gutted until very recently. (We'll show you our progress on that in an upcoming post.)

Because we're going to use the room as my work space as well as a place to keep the dogs when they're dirty or we have company we needed to be able to close the room off without closing out all the heat from the kitchen wood stove. Jon came up with the great idea for a dutch door!

To find a door that would suit us we knew exactly where to go. BalleyCanoe is a great spot for a weekend road trip. They have some great stuff, some fun stuff and some stuff you might just shake your head at.

The door isn't ready yet – we'll show you as soon as it is. But here are a few pictures I took on our shopping trip.

Oh...the choices!

Looking, looking - too many choices!

Here's a maybe.

And we have a winner!

Some more of the good stuff.

Probably some fun stuff in the basement.

And something that just might make you shake your head and chuckle.

First Things First

Way back in early March our huge order of seeds came in the mail from West Coast Seeds in British Columbia. We decided to make one (very) large order from them all at once rather than a few seeds from here and there. We chose them for a number of reasons but primarily because they sell only open pollinated, organic and non- gmo seeds and we made the decision early on that if we were going to go for this dream we were going to do it right.