First Harvest Crop

While most people are figuring out how to get rid of the "weed" in their garden or lawn, we're picking the dreaded dandilion and making hortapita, the cousin of spanakopita, where you use any greens you have. And we have plenty.

Updating the Update :-)

I guess I should explain. I have been, most all of February, reading up on how to raise rabbits for food. I could have posted tid bits of what I was learning, but let's just say, aside from learning what's needed to take care of them, I learned most people don't want to talk about where their meat comes from. I'm not going to change my path for the faint of heart, but I will take the same approach I do when I'm on some new diet, I don't share unless they really want to know. And I know they want to know more when they ask intelligent questions.

2012 Iditarod has a winner

Dallas Seavey has won the 2012 Iditarod Dog Sled Race. Our favorite to win, Aliy Zirkle will come in second. Better luck next time girl.

My March Madness

So as I figure this spring, summer will be way too hot. We had nothing for winter. It's March 13 and it's 60 degrees. We're not going to all of a sudden get a frost so bad it's going to knock out my lettuce and spinach, so I'm planting the first round of the year. If Mother Nature proves me wrong, so be it, if not, I'll be eating my own spinach and lettuce in 45-55 days. Another thing,do you see in the picture, spinach already there. That was from last year. I planted late September or so because it was so warm, it came up a bit like you see here. I covered it with a makeshift hoop house- garden stakes with translucent plastic tied to it. The cold came and in my laziness, I didn't take the hoop house down. It stayed up all winter and instead of rotting the baby spinach, it just went dormant because here we are and it never looked any different all winter long. I'm very interested to see if it will pick up and grow bigger. In all my gardening books I have never come across this bit of information. Maybe it was a fluke cause of this mild winter, but this is just another reason when you are better connected to the land and nature, you can hear and see the subtleness.
First three rows from me, green swiss chard, next two rows, multi colored chard, then Forellenschluss, yeah, a lettuce, then Amish deer tongue, then one row of Susan's red bibb lettuce, all the seeds I had left, and filled in the rest of the bed with spinich. Finished with a low makeshift hoop house.

Rabbit Update

So I have located a woman in Green Bay who has Silver Fox rabbits. She has a buck for me, ready now and a litter ready sometime at the beginning of April in which I'll get my doe out of. She will only be eight weeks old so I'll have to wait another two months or so before she's of breeding age. That's June. Okay. Then, if she mates right away, it takes about 30 days to kindle a litter. That's July. Then it take another 10 weeks or so for them to get to fryer weight. Now we're talking late September, early October before we dine on rabbit. I guess the consolation prize will be all through the spring and summer I'll have the best manure for the garden.

Opening Day of 2012 Iditarod

The race opened yesterday with ceremony in Anchorage, and officially started out of Willow today. I have to say, I've never been as into this race as I am currently. With that new found interest, I have run the gamete of thoughts and feelings. Here are some, in no particular order. It all started with Chloe's interest in Alaska a few months back. Or even almost a year now, after Aunt Penny went and sent her a post card. She claimed it her favorite state. So I set out to help her know more facts about Alaska and in doing so, I too started to like the state and what better icon to learn about, but the greatest race on earth, the Iditarod. We read Balto books and saw the movie. We looked on maps and watched YouTube videos of past year Iditarods. I started to know the mushers names, their lingo, the cities along the trail. That on even years they run the north trail consisting of The Steps, a difficult part of the trail that dumps many a mushers and their sleds. This March 3, I was all set, even stoked, to see as much coverage of the event as I could. I became Face book friends with Anchorage Daily News. I also found www.iditarod.com that for 19.99, you can stream it live. I bought it. So as as I'm watching the official start today I reflect on how awesome this task is and how rugged, and amazing these men, women, and dogs are. This is pretty balls of a thing to do. And in this age of GPS tracking, head & sled cams, live streams and mega sponsors, I'm looking for the soul that these people have for the race. I mean, do they realize the epic journey this race represents. I hear and see it in a few of the old timers, but these new mushers, the media coverage, the high tech gear, the nearly $400,000 it takes a year to maintain a top racing team. It just feels a little like the stats over the screen with a small live video is separating me from the deeper meaning of the race. That triumphant, man and his dogs against wild terrain and even worse weather. I'm grateful for the additional information and the ability to watch as much of it as I can from the comfort of my living room, but the PBS, emotional jerker of a story I was conjuring up thoughts of is just not how they spin it now. It's a little like motor cross coverage.