The doorstep Buddha and the daffodils were buried this morning under several inches of new, wet snow. It snowed all day — big fat wet flakes covering everything in the garden. I love this time of year. One day it’s seventy and sunny and I’m outside checking buds on the roses, looking to see which perennials are up (trying to remember what I planted where), and then a day later, everything is covered in a nice wet blanket of not-very-cold snow. Luckily, the apple trees have only just started budding out. I didn’t get any apples last year, and it…
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Sorry it’s been so quiet around here lately. I spent all last week fighting with my wireless connection — for some strange reason, I could get internet connectivity during the afternoons and evening, but not the morning?! It was maddening — and was one of those things that took up hours and hours of my time. Finally, I went to our local Mac guys, and we got things reconfigured, and so far, all has been well. Keep your fingers crossed for me. Those who already have access to reliable internet may use the best residential proxies to protect the privacy…
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Okay, I’m an official dog-geek now. Look, it’s Odin, Prince Rainier’s faithful, six-and-one-half year old dog following his coffin through the streets of Monaco. The news wire said that Odin followed along "limping slightly." Make me cry already.
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Yesterday it was 75 degrees and sunny. Today it’s snowing.
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So — now that it’s spring, and I’ve got teeny tiny little spinach (and arugula) seedlings poking up in the garden, I find myself most nights rooting around in the bottom bin of my basement freezer pulling out packets of spinach and chard I put up last summer. When I put them up, I envisioned myself eating them in deepest January, when the snow was piled up around my wee Montana house. Of course, we had no snow this winter, but nonetheless, what did I eat this winter? It wasn’t frozen greens from downstairs — I don’t know now what…
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My new remote temperature sensor came yesterday, and this morning while the sensor in the garden read 29 degrees, the one in the cold frames read 48 degrees. The cold frames actually work! They hold heat overnight — still too cold to leave my tender tomatoes out in overnight, but I’m just thrilled that they actually work. Yesterday afternoon, which was sunny, it was a balmy 75 in the cold frames, 65 outside ….
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Sometimes a person just needs a weekend where you really don’t do anything. This is a concept I came to late in life — until I moved to California and got my job at the Big Corporation, I’d always worked at least two jobs, and one of them was usually retail. Which means I didn’t have weekends — I’d have a day off somewhere in the middle of the week, and after a while I managed to get out of working Sundays, and so it was something of an adjustment when Patrick and I moved in together, and those weekends…
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It’s spring, which means time to spend the weekend doing little projects in my garden. Some of you may remember last spring when I built my cold frames. They were nice cold frames, but I didn’t take into account the famous winter winds of Livingston. The cold frames didn’t weather winter particularly well — the old storm windows I used blew off and the glass all broke, and the heavy-duty plastic sheeting also shredded over time. So I ordered some corrugated plastic a few weeks ago, figuring it would not only be tougher than the original cold frame coverings, but…