Color and Form

Wet is the Wet

Despair is creeping in. As the water rises, and keeps rising, so my bearings slip and the more I feel like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York. Losing my #%@t! Time has been frozen even though things keep happening, keep changing. Keep growing.

To mention a few of the greater things.....

*We went out to see a play last week, All My Sons by Arthur Miller at the Playmakers theater in Chapel Hill. WOWOWWOW. It was an amazing production, very powerful very sad. If you can go this week, GO.
*We saved ourselves hundreds of dollars, maybe more, by having the great epiphany to use Stuart's parents' old bathtub for our guest bathroom---it looks awesome and to top it all off it's freakin' Carolina Blue. What more could I ask for?
*The ranunculus as shooting up buds. I'm not getting my hopes up too high seeing as how our other hoophouse flowers have been acting up, but it is slightly thrilling, especially considering we are growing chocolate colored stems. I think my heartbeat just sped up thinking about the color. Or was that a physiological reaction to the word chocolate?
*The delphinium are looking like little giants, arms arched, ready to will themselves into this wild and crazy world. Bloom tall ladies. Strong and tall, and keep it real.

*The eating is good. As it should be.

As a side note, we got a lovely email over the weekend from some folks who would like to start farming in a few years who had some questions for us. Somehow that email was deleted, so please resend!!!

Windows ARE IN!!!

For Leah, for whom the flowers grow

Breathe Easy

Amazingly enough, there was no snow damage on the farm. The 2 x 4 braces worked! We got around 8 inches on the farm and it is a beautiful sight. The roads have been
treacherous though, and it took two attempts in our 4wheel drive truck to make it over to our farm. Things in our greenhouse were drying out fast so I'm glad we made it when we did. We are thrilled to see the bells of ireland are germinating; we haven't had these germinate since '06.
You can see the new shed that Stuart and Gerard put together. This is going to be a much-needed tool shed located close to our cultivation fields. We are now ready to debut the inside of our second hoophouse. We are still in shock that it hasn't been planted yet, but the weather has been rough this winter. Extremely wet and very cold. So perhaps in March and April we will have loads of veggies??? Since we've been snowed in, Stuart and I have played a million games of ping-pong for our cardiovascular workouts and strength training. Gotta get ready for the season somehow, right? I am thrilled to announce the fact that I won my first (and as of yet, only) game against my husband. I have now entered the realm of lightning speed reflexes, ace serves, line shots, and everlasting rallies. Watch out brother Ben, you are next.

Bracing for the storm

We put these support beams up yesterday in the hopes they will keep our greenhouse and hoophouses from caving in from the weight of the snow. We are crossing our fingers and trying to breathe right until we make our way back to the farm to see what has happened.

In the meantime, we are snowed in and roaming the web. If you are a flower lover, you MUST check out these hellebores. Something to drool over. I was thinking I'd get into clematis, but maybe hellebores are the way to go.....I've heard it can be hard to hydrate clematis and that hellebores have droopy heads. Hmmmm.

Also, here is the kitchen design we've found that we like the most. We would probably make a different backsplash tile design, different colors.

I think there's something on my nose.....

Meet my new baby

She is a calla lily. Her potential is big. She is going to be pale pink, like the touch of dawn or like the faint blush of a young girl when she sees her lover-to-be. Ethereal and fleeting. Soft.

The tubers, on the other hand, are solid and heavy and convincing. I can do this, right? It is time to try my hand at these. My fear becomes my courage, and voila, there is a small bag of them at the door. Wish me luck.

The tulips are looking good so far, with healthy roots pushing through. I can't wait to see the colors! I think they are only a couple weeks out. We're hoping they will bloom for valentine's day, but we shall see.

Midnight Mouse Massacre

The devastation continues.
Our losses: ten trays of spinach, rummaged through right before they germinated, several trays of onions, one tulip bit off right at the base and left to wither.....
Their losses: nineteen members in the past week have gone down, twelve just yesterday. We put one of their heads on a toothpick right outside the door as a warning.
Our strategy: brilliant idea to glue food to the numerous (20+) traps so any movement whatsoever and an instant SNAP!!!! mouse breaks neck, keeps face of agony for photo id. We put out the dead in an open field for an easy sighting by a bird of prey, thus befriending bird of prey.
Their strategy: to mate like crazy fools, creating an uncontrollable population; to poop in the deepest recesses of the greenhouse to draw their kin in to decimate our seeding trays; and to befriend our dog Clover whose great great great great grandfather on her mother's side was a mouse as you can tell every now and then by looking closely in her eyes.
Wish us luck this next week. We reseeded all the spinach trays, so game on miceys.

Off to market they go...

The first few bunches of our anemones are off to market! The flowers all took a pretty serious hit with the cold weather over the past few weeks. Probably hundreds of stem losses. I hope they bounce back and are in fine form for Valentine's Day. We are also sending arugula, lettuce mix, radishes and spinach to market today. Next week, maybe the broccoli raab will be ready?