A little March-ing

Yesterday was another of those precious days that feel like spring, well before spring is really here. You can't really work in the garden, but you can be outside feeling the sun on your skin. The roving bands of chickens were having a ball wandering all over the farm.I did manage to pull the stray turnips from last year and drag in the bamboo tipis and structures that dotted my garden (Bob grows bamboo, so I go a little crazy with it) just in case the tractor and plow wander up this way.
My sister and I wandered down into the woods again. The redtail hawks are everywhere. Along the way, at the end of a row of trees we found something that Maryanne says is known as "buck rub" where they rub the velvet from their antlers. That is a phrase that struck my funny bone, and unfortunately for those around me, I've been busy finding ways to use it in various sentences. Buck rub is the bane of the tree farmer's existance, so it strikes me as even odder to only be hearing about this now, 20 years or more after they moved onto a tree farm! Could it be that my family, recognizing that the combination of my jr. high sense of humor plus an affinity for words would find the term too glorious not to bandy about? Ah well... Aye yam what aye yam.

We found this little bronze fern-y thing. I don't know what it is, but I'm hoping that someone reading will! I do believe that it is normally green.

As we got nearer to the house, I needed to check on the wintergreen that my sweetie and I dug up on our Autumn sojourn into the woods. Sure enough, there were 7 or 8 little rootlets doing fine, happily surviving the end of the winter. Whew! Next we headed in to the soap barn to make 8 batches of soap. We've been getting wholesale orders pretty steadily for the last few weeks, so we're needing to keep up. We slacked off pretty well through January and part of Feb., so we're paying now. One of the things we've decided is to allow ourselves to make some things that aren't really for wholesale, but are fun. So each session we have, we try to squeeze in something that we'll offer at the farmers market this summer and on my website. These are Salt Spa Bars. They have a healthy amount of salt added to the mixture before being poured into the mold. I personally don't like using them in the winter, but during the other three seasons they remind me of the shower you take after spending the day in the ocean - clean, fresh, and soft. The bluish green one is Ocean Rain and the reddish orange one is Yuzu. They average a little over 7 ounces each! They're on my site.