The sun came out this afternoon and I wandered around the garden looking at all the little bulbs starting to come up, daffodils, tulips, crocuses. There are yellow crocuses starting to bloom. The yellow ones always seem to be the earliest. There are a few winter aconites and the snowdrops under the birch tree are a white carpet. The air just smells different, like things are beginning to grow again.
Joel brought in a truckload of wood from our woods. We heat, cook, and heat hot water with our wood cookstove and get all our fuel from our own woods. About 8 or our 20 acres is in woods and we take out the dead and downed wood for fuel and an occasional large tree for lumber. There are several sawmills on the island and it is nice to have at least some of the lumber for a building project from our own place. So we grow a lot of our own food and most of our energy.
A couple of days go Joel started the first two flats of lettuce seedlings and the first tomatoes for the hoophouse. We grow up to fifty different types of lettuce every year scouring the catalogues for new and heirloom varieties to try. It is amazing how many cultivars of lettuce there are. We'll probably never end up growing all of them. Lettuce is probably our best selling crop. Joel is famous for his lettuce on San Juan island for good reason. We grow a wide variety of vegetables, actually almost anything that we can coax to grow in our climate. That has, for us, proven to be the best way to grow for a Farmers market. people come to buy a variety of foods every week, not more of the same thing.
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