Pete & Teri’s Next Big Adventure

No time for funny farm stories or anything like that – spring is busy busy busy, lots of things growing in the ground already and critters popping babies out right and left – but here's some pretty photos, which is probably why you're here anyway…

Spring in the orchard

Pear tree

Raspberries

Wild strawberries

Hops

Bees love dead nettle

…and there's way more of it than we could hope to eat

Horseradish

Lingonberry bushes are hanging on, and they flower, but no fruit

New garden gate for new garden fence that will keep the deer out this summer. We hope…

Storage shed under construction – to free up a nicer building that I want to use as an office

The turkale keeps on turkking

The river at dusk, after several days of unusually heavy rain

We recently enjoyed a delicious salad made mostly of "weeds":

Ingredients:

• Young dandelion leaves (feral)
• Dead nettle tops with their purple flowers (feral)
• Ox-eye daisy greens (feral)
• Chives (just starting to come back up from last year's planting)
• Turkale* sprouts (planted a few weeks ago in a cold frame)

Teri whipped up a lemon-garlic-olive oil dressing that perfectly smoothed the sharp flavor of the dandelion, and as soon as I finish this post the remains of the salad will be going into an omelet.  It feels SO good to start getting fresh produce from the garden again, especially since about the only effort involved was in gathering the greens!

* We planted turnips and kale in the cold frame last winter, not thinking of the fact that they are closely related and can interbreed.  Some of the seeds that resulted are now sprouting in the cold frame, but we really can't be sure whether we created an unintentional hybrid – so until it becomes clear what this stuff is, we're calling it "Turkale."  Either way, the greens should be tasty