prepping

Thank goodness spring evenings are long. Time enough between dinner - which has lately been eaten hurridly on the porch instead of at the table, the better to get it doen quickly and get outside - and bedtime to have a few precious hours of time in the yard. I won't say garden, because it isn't, yet, but we're getting there. There are so many things I want to do to the yard, too many. Landscaping and grass for playing and tree thinning here and planting there and the vegetable garden and the bee yard and the chicken yarn and a place to sit and eat and laze the summer days away. Too many to realiztically get it done this year. I keep reminding myself that there will be other springs and summers to turn our little bit of neglected woods into the something we have in mind.

Right now we are focusing on the impending needs. Seedlings that need to go into the ground in the next week, bees that will arrive in a matter of days, chickens that need to be bought before it becomes too hard to find what we want. So it's a few beds, instead of many. And if the coop is unpainted for a while, well, so be it. There is no pretty path to the bee yard, just an area wide enough to walk where the blackberries have (I hope) been whacked back into oblivion (the rest have been left alone because...well...blackberry honey sounds pretty good, doesn't it?) There is a lot of bare earth where the bread oven or the flower beds or the grill or the grass will go, when we get to it. In time. I just have to keep chanting that. All in good time.

and on the last day of winter

Over the course of the day we got more a foot of new snow. It snowed and snowed and snowed, all day long. The UPS driver was not very pleased to be delivering three big boxes in the middle of the storm, but he did, trudging down our road with them because he didn't want to get the truck stuck. And ohhh, I'm glad he did. I've been waiting for those boxes. For weeks, and also for years. It's been almost three years since I took a class on beekeeping and talked Will into this crazy plan of mine. In between we've moved twice, acquired another degree as well as two kittens, spent a year in an apartment and bought a house in the woods.

When I ordered our hive (from here, in case you are interested in one as well) I didn't expect it to arrive in the middle of a snowstorm. But it was the perfect end to winter (technically the end, at least) something so purely summer in my mind that I didn't mind digging out the car this morning. Because summer is COMING. It must be. The hive is here. The bees are heading our way (not for another month, but still, coming!) Bees!