It's Spring! (in my basement)

I have to be honest here although I have been myself, I really have been functioning this winter on a time limit basis. For whatever reason this winter has been especially hard on me and I have been sitting there waiting for it to be over. The time is up.

Now wait a second...

Do NOT get me wrong here, I love the seasons. That is why I live in New Hampshire! There is something I love about every single season. The things I love about Winter are the really cold snowy nights. When the temperature is in the 20's and there is a few inches (or feet) on the ground, if you walk at night while snow is falling, the world is so quiet. All you can hear is the sound of your feet crunching on the snow. We haven't had that. We have had really cold nights, cold and rainy nights, and we have had cold and 70mph wind nights which knock power out for almost a week. We have NOT had any cold and snowy nights. I am talking the full on 22 inch blizzard. No, instead the south got that.

But this isn't my point.

My family has done what we could to make it feel like spring for example, we hatched eggs in February.

I even started my seeds. Harry took our pantry shelves and installed grow lights on them for me so that every spring I can start out seeds indoors. (we live in New Hampshire and therefore I could not possibly start all the seeds we need direct sow into the garden.
Although I know there are many others, the only plants we really direct sow are corn,green beans, peas, taters, garlic and radishes. I started all our tomatoes (beefsteak and cherry), cukes, Green peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, marigolds and some other herby type things. They are doing quite well but that doesnt show very well in my crappy cell phone picture so I am sorry.


But this psuedo winter that isn't really a Northern New England winter will not let go. I am losing my mind trying to think of things I can do to make spring come now. What have you all been doing to keep yourselves spring like?

Super Mega Attack Frankenchickens!

I am very excited. This weekend we will be starting our seeds for the super mega s-wood south garden! Dave is going to put together some grow lights and we are going to be getting them all going! Also notable improvement for the weekend will be that we are going to create (when I say “we” I really mean “he”) a growing pen inside the chicken coop and move the baby chickens out there.

Speaking of the hateful little beasties, I mean chickens, it appears that out of the 6 I kept, 3 of them are hens. Now I am not chicken expert and I can’t possibly really know until they start choking out their first crows, but there are 3 distinctly different chickens in that pen. Larger combs, redder combs, their eyes are even bigger. Oh and they are mean. That’s not different then the other 3. I don’t know what is going on with these chickens but they are NOT nice. No matter how much we handle them, feed them, coo at them. They peck you and run away! I don’t understand it at all. The babies I got from the hatchery last year were so sweet as pie at this stage… They hate me! I keep wondering if in breeding them I created some sort of Frankenstein chicken or something that is going to turn on me and try to murder our family while we sleep!

I will be sure to update you and post pictures of our indoor gardening this weekend. You guys have no idea HOW excited I am for the spring to finally get here. I know it will take longer on the mountain so we will probably not have access to shmoopywood until may, but there is so much we want to do up there this year to make it more comfortable!

On being "Off-Grid"

Hi Everyone, I am back from my vacation to Tampa to hang with the mother and enjoy nice weather! It was a great trip but we were so glad to be back. Upon our arrival we were greeted with heavy downpours and wind. We were mentioning how thankful we were that it was not snow as it should be this time of year. I got a new truck, picked it up Thursday of last week and when we got home the weather cranked it up a notch. THere were reported 70mph wind gusts. Nobody was prepared for it and 300,000 people suddenly lost power. We at Swood south were 1 of those families.

We talk alot about how we want to go off grid and with that comes alot of preparation on our part. We prepare so that daily tasks can be as comfortable as possible and yet still take us off the grid. Unfortunately Swood SOUTH is not prepared for too much off grid activity and although we had a generator and a roof over our heads (which is more than many and for that we are thankful) we were without some of the major comforts. This made the 4th and 5th day of forced "off grid" trying.

I also talk alot about learning and experiencing life and we will put this into our "lessons learned" file and build off of that. We learned the supplies we were lacking and we will make sure that Swood North has those comforts.

We got our power back today (at 4am) and slowly things are going back to normal.


L