Winter Garden

I'm calling it officially winter now that we've had multiple freezing nights all in a row. Yesterday I was home all day and ventured outside in the afternoon to complete a few chores and spend some time with my mom's dogs.

In the garden I saw that the frost has finally taken a toll on the cardoons. Wilting, although they look like they'd be fine if we'd just given them a little protection.

Even though these just look like barren stalks right now, its our first planting of raspberries, so I'm pretty excited. There are only a few canes so far, but I plan to extend the raspberry planting along the south side of the fence.

And just for the record, the garden looks super weedy because it is super weedy. We haven't cleaned it up yet because birds keep foraging in there, and we want to let them eat all they can. We've had a pheasant grazing back there most mornings. Beautiful, but I never remember to take my camera out that early to capture a photo.

I spent part of it restocking the wood pile for my wood stove. We have a huge pile of wood stockpiled from all of the trees that we've had to cut down, and try to have the tree company cut the wood down into manageable pieces, and/or shred it so we can reuse it as mulch. Anything that was cut small enough to fit in the wood stove, I burn. Its a mixture of woods, and not always the best for a fire, but it works. Alternately, when the remaining pre-cut wood is too big to fit into the wood stove, I split it or cut smaller pieces myself. I need to replace the chain on my chainsaw though, and so yesterday was just about sorting through the pile and taking what was there.

Two of the (four) namesake dogs. Happily hanging out by me as I sort through the woodpile.

The haul. This yellow garden cart has been our best "tool" investment. Love it.

Today I have some leaf raking on my list of things to do. With the size of this property I refuse to rake until all the leaves have fallen. Its an exhausting task as it is, and having to do it more than once a year is too depressing to contemplate. Maybe I'll take a photo of a giant pile of leaves later.