Spring is coming, I promise.

palo verde in bloom

Pomegranate in bloom

I’ve been away from the blog for a while. In honor of my return, I’m dedicating this blog to all my friends and family back east where they feel that Spring is never going to arrive.

Poppies (in bloom)

The gardens are starting to fill in. In the back, we just tilled the green litter in as extra compost. Didn’t really think about it until little corn plants started popping up everywhere. Unfortunately, the volunteer corn is Golden Bantam, while we actually planted Blue Hopi corn in that bed. I assume the two verities will cross-pollinate and we’ll end up with …Blue Bantam? Golden Hopi? Whatever. Should be interesting.

All the rinds and seeds from the Desert King watermelons from last summer went into the compost bins, and the compost bins went into the front garden. Now I have tiny watermelon plants pretty much everywhere. Considering the number of watermelons we got off of just three plants last year, I’ve a suspicion we’re going to up to our eyeballs in watermelons before too long.

Speaking of which, the great watermelon wine-bottling event took place this weekend. And we finally tasted our brew. Here’s what I can tell; it’s not horrible. If you taste it with “wine” in the back of your mind, you’re going to be disappointed. Watermelons don’t taste like grapes, never have, never will. But if you just have “alcohol” as your starting point, well by golly, we’ve got that part right! This stuff has a pretty good kick. And a vague melony-cinnamon, smoky kind of taste. I’m thinking some ginger ale, fresh fruit and a good chill and this stuff would make really tasty sangria.

And I’ve got fifteen bottles of the stuff, so if any local peeps want some, come and get it!

 

We had a bit of sad news over the winter. We lost Godiva, the first alpaca we ever owned, to old age. We buried her in the boy’s field. That’s where she wanted to be most of the time anyway, so it seemed fitting.

The rest of the herd is doing well. We’ll be shearing them next weekend. I think this year, since I have so much less free time with the job I started last summer; we’ll be sending a fair amount of fleece out for processing. I just don’t have the hours to dedicate to spinning, weaving or felting. I miss it, but as I slowly adjust to working 40 plus hours again, I’m hoping to get back into it, even if not on the same level as before.

 

For now, I’m going to take some of this rare free time to sit back, sip some killer-melon wine, and daydream about what I’m going to try fermenting next.