Spring Sprang Sprung

 “Hot enough for you?” Not the phrase you expect to be on people’s lips this time of year, but this weekend was certainly worthy of that exact conversation. Temperatures were well into the 70’s-- and even above that in some locations.

Aiden enjoys the outdoors

Vultures taking the sun

Tea Party

Congrats to the Newest Husky!

It was perfect weather for dining al fresco with friends and neighbors, celebrating milestones—congrats to Maricella—a newly minted “Husky”! Tea parties on the back deck, cuddling babies, moving into a new house—congrats Cameron and Beth! Mowing the grassing, hiking into* Packwood Lake, and all manner of other, outdoor, fair weather activity activities. 

John like cake. Clearly.

Lane didn't get any cake. Sad.

It was really good cake tho

*Disclaimer: we did hike into Packwood Lake. Just not all the way. Most of the way, sure. But once I started post-holing in a snow field that went on as far as the eye could see, well—that seemed a sign from the Patron Saint of Hikers that it was time to turn around. So, we did.

Spring seems to have sprung with intention this year. However, I am a lifelong Northwesterner and this is not my first rodeo. Even as I formulate these words I can feel the clouds rolling in. Good thing I already mowed my lawn. And yes, I call my patch of thatch, moss, and weeds “lawn.” It’s green, and I mow it: lawn. It was also very dusty, so if you were my neighbor? This would have been a very bad weekend to hang your laundry out to dry.

My straw bales are “cooking” nicely. It won’t be long before I’ll be able to plant them. And speaking of plants, I’m really itching to start my annual Nursery-Hopping Road Trip. I guess “trips” plural would be more accurate, because once I start buying flowers it’s hard to stop. 

Speaking of flowers---during our hike on Sunday I spotted a lone Lady Slipper orchid; a fragile wildflower I haven’t seen in years. Perhaps Lady Slippers were just waiting for the perfect spring day to put in their appearance. 

Mish, Even More Mashed—Support Groups and SBG

 I’m thinking of starting a support group. NOT, as you might be supposing—based on this title—for Straw Bale Gardeners, but a support group instead, for people who love to complain about the weather.

I love to complain about the weather, and—all bragging aside—I’m very good at it. Unfortunately for me, my talents will have to lie dormant this week as we are scheduled to have day, after day, after day of good weather. That’s bound to put my skills into cold turkey/withdrawal mode. Hence the need for a support group. I’m thinking we could all get together and complain about having nothing to complain about—thereby keeping our skills sharp and our muscles warm, ready for the next round of complaint-worthy weather. Now I just need to brainstorm meeting locations—grange? Umbrella factory? — figure out the best cookie baker in my bunch, and we’ll be set to go... Thursdays at 10 a.m. work for you?

Abby is helping.

Speaking of SBG—and I was, earlier, sort of—I got my straw bales over the weekend and am ready to start prepping them. Since it’s scheduled to be sunny all week I’ll have to unfurl my garden hose to water them. Last year it rained so much during my twelve-day straw-prep period that I only had to water them myself once or twice. (Please note that I have very skillfully managed a near-complaint about being saddled with a stretch of good weather. Skillz, I haz ‘em!)

If you’re thinking a SBG sounds like fun, get yourself to your nearest feed store or friendly farmer—I go to Overby’s in Randle. Good prices, and he loads it right in the vehicle for me. It would be even better service it he UNLOADED it for me—but in all fairness, I didn’t actually ask him the availability of that service. He offered to bag the bale for me, to keep the chafe out of my upholstery. Which turned out to be a service I should have taken him up on. In other related news: air compressors and lint-rollers combined, will—eventually--remove the chafe. “Eventually” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Ryan Gosling--get it?

If you live in Onalaska, I recommend Premium Quality Hay and Feed for straw. They are located right off of Highway 12, which is handy. Unfortunately, they also carry adorable baby goslings, and I spend way too much time trying to convince myself that that I don’t really need a baby Russian Goose named Ryan...

Once you have your straw—I’ll leave it to your own discretion when it comes to your goose needs-- just place the bales in a sunny location, sprinkle ½ cup of cheap, nitrogen rich fertilizer on them every other day for a week. Give them a good soaking each day you fertilize. Days 7-9: ¼ cup fertilize; use warm water to saturation. Day 10 is one cup per bale of a balanced, slow release fertilizer. On day 12 you can plant!

Probably best you didn’t get the goose after all, since Ryan is bound to pull up all your little seedlings...but it WOULD give you something to complain about...

April MishMash

 Yes, mishmash is too a word. If it wasn’t a word, what did you just read? I rest my case.

April weather has been all over the place—which is kind of normal. I remember the Easters of my childhood often containing a little bit of everything; rain, sun, snow, some wind, perhaps a brief burst of hail—or as one of my sons referred to it as when he was little and observed hail falling on our back deck—“Look, Mom! Snow Skittles!”

April First has come and gone. I recall my dad’s love for April Fool’s pranks—one of his great successes was telling his teenaged daughter-- at sunrise-- that her horse got out. I dragged my sleepy carcass out of bed and into boots and came stumbling out to ask him in which direction my wayward steed had been headed only to have him triumphantly crow “April Fools!” Well played, Willis. Well played.

Johnny searchs for hanging blueberries

Easter was last week and I watched the next generation of kids and dogs, hunting Easter eggs. The weather was semi-co-operative and the egg hunt was held outdoors—not indoors. A much better locations, we can all agree. It’s a lot easier for the dogs to abscond with some delicious treasure that way.

The sun came out long enough that I was even able to mow my grass for the first time this year. And in related good news—my lawn mower fired right up. Hooray!

We have new neighbors here in my neck of the woods and they are lovely people. Which, in itself, is nice. They also happen to be lovely people with a tractor brush hog attachment, a dislike of encroaching blackberry bushes, and a willingness to subdue my unruly vines as well as their own. They say fences make good neighbors but I submit that tractor owning neighbors make good neighbors. I feel pretty fortunate to have a plethora a generous, tractor owning neighbors, and Dene and Gloria fit right in. Welcome to the neighborhood!

All in all, April is off to a good start.

It Must Be Spring

 You know how I can tell? If you guessed robin’s tugging on worms or daffodils blooming or <please insert some other signs of spring I’ve failed to mention here>. If you guessed any of these you are sadly mistaken. I know it is spring because I need to mow the grass-- but my lawn got snowed on.

Of course, it wasn’t a lot of snow-- but that’s not my point. It’s also not my point that, resting on the laurels of the prior year’s successful lawn mower maintenance, I completely forgot to do any last fall. And here I am again, with my grass slowly greening, wondering if my mower will start...

Fortunately for me, there was some pre-season use of the mower-as-skidder, so all that dragging away of trimmed of tree limbs means that it hasn’t been that long since my mower has been powered up. It’s entirely possible that the next time the sun peeks out, my mower will fire right up.

This time of year, it’s a race to trim my grass before it gets as high as an elephant’s eye while avoiding rain-mixed-with-snow-showers. Or the ever-unfortunate “it’s a gloriously sunny day but I’ve got spring fever and am either 1) on a picnic; or 2) on a road trip to every nursery with in a day’s driving distance,  buying all the plants; or 3) both.”

A sure sign of spring around Casa Sume is the appearance of plants, seeds, straw bales—and usually in that bass-ackwards order. After the impressive—sometimes frightening success—of last year’s Straw Bale Garden, I’m kind of chomping on the bit to get going again. I can’t wait to have my first plateful of tomato bruschetta—topped with fresh whole milk mozzarella and new basil. I may have already purchased a tiny little nibbin of a start of my new favorite heirloom tomato, “Kellogg’s Breakfast.” While I have yet to purchase the straw that will be Mrs. Kellogg’s new home, I’m having her keep me company in the house. She has already grown to three times her height at time of purchase and I think it’s because she likes bingeing on Netflix with me...

Annie isn’t sure if a tomato on the couch is A GOOD IDEA