Nature's First Green

You remember that poem, by Robert Frost?

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay."

Well, in my winter garden, Nature's first green is actually purple.

Asian Braising Greens

Kale, Russian "Wild Garden Frills"

Asian Baby Leaf mix

Manzanita

Bees and Eggs

Just thought you'd like to know, I sat down in front of the hive for a good quarter of an hour today and watched plenty of comings and goings. (I thought you might be worried after my post yesterday, when I said I'd seen little activity.) It's a warmish day with light misty rain, and the newly hatched bees came out for a practice flight, and others were foraging (for what, I can't imagine, after the hard freezes last week, but bees are experts, you know). One bee even came in with pollen!

The bee at the top center has some yellow pollen on her legs

Our chickens are laying so well (still no molt!) that I had to find recipes to use up eggs. So I just put a pound cake in the oven (a Jacques Pepin recipe) and will make a breakfast casserole for dinner tonight, with sausage and greens. The egg yolks are just the most beautiful color.

Does anyone else notice their home-laid chicken eggs have very little white, and much more yolk? Or is it just that the whites are so firm that they don't spread out as much?

Christmas lights are going up, beer is being bottled, our honey wine is bubbling away, and I just put a finished homemade bone broth in to jars for the freezer. Next up, putting the orange decorations away and getting out all the red and green stuff. We're days behind in our advent calendar duties.

Is Sunday a day of 'getting things done' for you, too?

Disgruntled

Nothing seems to be going right at Poppy Corners lately.

Our dishwasher crashed.

Our front doorknob stopped working.

The water feature suddenly spluttered its last.

My sourdough starter began to smell like gym socks.

The bee activity at the hive entrance is greatly reduced.

The dog had a weird thing where he yelped every time we touched his neck.

I had to step it up big time at work, with two very high-need children starting with us.

Kate got sick and missed three days of school.

All the neighbors already have their Christmas decorations up, and we still have pumpkins on our front stoop.

The weather is doing funny things - barometer up, barometer down - which causes me to have pretty nasty migraines.

And to top it all off, the garden is just not thriving. I can't figure out if it's a water problem, a soil problem, or if everything is taking its time germinating because it's so dang cold.

So I pretty much I felt like I wasn't doing anything well at all this week.

I felt like this old, cast-off boot I saw in the weeds next to a warehouse. Useless.

So today I took the day off. I took Adam to the Conservatory, then grabbed Kate and met a friend in Berkeley, where we spent several blissful hours touring open artist studios (Berkeley Artisans) and eating tacos at Picante. This friend and I are kindred spirits, so we laughed and trooped around and generally acted like goofballs. I found this cured my headache, put both Kate and I in an improved mood, and made facing the rest of the day bearable.

We came home to find the dishwasher and the doorknobs fixed (yay for Tom). The dog had been to the vet and found to have nothing more than a wrenched neck muscle (hooray for painkillers). We hung some wreaths outside, and hope to do lights tomorrow. I took the pumpkins to the compost. I washed and filled up the bird feeders. I decided to make a loaf of bread from the funky sourdough, and it wasn't horrible (we'll use it in a savory bread pudding tomorrow). And I juiced a dozen Meyer lemons for the freezer. It's hard to feel bad when you're juicing a slice of sunshine.

Tom was kind enough to hold this up for me.

As Anne Shirley of Green Gables says, "Tomorrow is another day without any mistakes in it yet."

Feelin' Like a Real Farmer

This morning I had to put on my woolens,

grab my adze,

go to the troughs,

and break through the layer of ice so the livestock could have fresh water.

Well, not really.

I did however have to throw on a sweater, bite my lip, and break the ice in the chicken waterer with my bare fingers.

Damned if I didn't feel like a real farmer.

Hard Freeze

This morning when I took the dog for a walk, the world was frozen and still. Our water feature was stopped and frozen. The drip system couldn't go on because the hoses were frozen. The poop in the hen house, fresh overnight, solid as a rock by morning.

As I walked through the neighborhood, I kept hearing a sound like rain. And then I realized it was leaves. All the leaves that had hung on through a few frosts were at last giving up. The mulberry and ash trees on our block were especially copious and loud. It was rather delightful, I don't think I've ever heard leaves falling like that before.

And of course I thought of this. Monty Python has a moment for just about every occasion.

Fun to look at all the leaves today, both in the neighborhood (piles and piles and piles), in our yard, and out in the open space.

wild grape

maple! not common here

pistache

yellow (or tulip) poplar

Now it's time to cut down all the dead flowers in the yard. Glad the bees have plenty of honey stored.