A beautiful Spring day

Saturday, May 30

What a beautiful Spring day today! The sun was shining and there was a nice cool breeze to keep ya cool when out in the sun. I believe the day’s wonderful temperature started last night with these…

… cloudy skies ahead and the sun setting behind created a Fall look on the mountain. It was almost surreal. Just as the sun was about to fall below the mountain the skies looked like this…

… very intense pink cloudy skies. The setting sun brought much appreciated cooler temperatures. (I can’t believe I’m saying that after such a long but thankfully not harsh winter but I’m not a fan of being hot.) And although it was such a lovely day to be outside I spent much of the day reclaiming the pantry. It’s crazy how quickly it can get out of hand and then you can’t find anything or you don’t know what you have. It needed a good cleaning too so I made that my project of the day. Here’s the results…

These shelves are just inside the doorway. I decided the flours, sugars and spices needed to reside there for easy access. I also grouped all the Taco Tuesday items together and CountryBoy’s favorite – all the items for spaghetti & pastas together. The cereal bars & granola bars are for the cabin guests but I figured they would be easily accessible when we go to stock the cabin. The shelves facing the doorway is a plethora of goods…

Lots of pickled beets, applesauce, jams & jellies, squash relish, pickled items, homemade broths, some store bought cans of tomato sauce & paste and beans and sadly, only two pint jars of green beans, a quart jar of corn, a quart jar of small potatoes and two quart jars of squash are all that’s left from our previous garden’s goodness. The big glass jar holds opened bags of miscellaneous items, cuz, well we do get the occasional mouse especially this time of year. In fact, I was in the pantry yesterday and saw a mouse scurry on by and into the storage room beyond the pantry. He’s no longer with us I must say. But anyway, it’s nothing fancy but it’s organized and clean. Let’s see how long we can keep it like this, ha!

I worked on the baby blanket this morning and had most of the remaining tails weaved in before the coffee was ready…

The extra chains I added at the beginning and the extra rows that I added as well made the blanket the exact size I wanted – 30×32. I’ll be creating a tag for it tomorrow and bundling it up to pop in the mail early next week.

Right after I finished my coffee I started the laundry. While working on the pantry I got two loads washed, hung on the line to dry, folded and put away. It was the perfect day for hanging clothes on the line!

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The cabin guests left this morning to do some sightseeing. While they were gone CountryBoy headed up there to check the water tank at the bathhouse and to cut the pipe to look for any blockage. There was nothing blocking the flow so we’ve determined that we need a bigger pipe. We’ll have to pick one up some day soon.

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Farm news: 33 eggs

CountryBoy cleaned out the chicken coop this morning so today became graduation day for the chicks & turkeys. Yay! He set up the grow-out cage inside the coop which gives the young’uns more room and lets everyone ‘get acquainted’…

I think the big girls were more interested in trying to get to the young’uns food, ha! We’ll leave them in the grow-out cage until they get bigger before we let them roam with the big girls. They need to be big enough to handle the ‘establishing of the pecking order’ ritual. We have found, though, that by having them in the coop but safe in their cage has help minimize the whole pecking order process.

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We can finally see the rows of goodness in the garden…

Only half of the garden has been planted so far. (The big pile to the left of the garden is the remnants of the now clean chicken coop. Let it sit for a bit and it becomes great fertilizer!) He also planted two raspberry bushes, relocated the blueberry bushes, mowed and weed-eated.