And I’m trying to one up last year’s early start. I’ve got five of six kale starts from the fall that survived (thrived really) in the cold frame. I transplanted them into a raised bed today. And put a simple hoop cover over the row. In theory that will help them grow faster in a warmer little micro-climate as spring heads our way. Hopefully we don’t get any more snow now.

Despite it being a fairly dry fall and a very dry start of winter, it’s also been foggy and hazy a lot so we’ve not been generating as much power as might’ve been expected given the relatively clear weather.

At this point we have an awesome storage space of about 160 square feet which allows us to get random things out of the garage and closets which were crammed way too full with the seldom or only seasonally used camping, snow, beer kegging, equipment, empty boxes, etc.

But I’m not sure I’m going to stop there. I’m getting a quote on a continuous ridge vent since the original roof only has vents every third or so set of joists and that only on the north side. Once that is installed I can staple in paper faced insulation and cover that with dry wall. With a bit of additional framing to isolated this space from the other half of the attic, which is dominated by duct work, we’ll have a roughly finished in attic storage. I’m inclined to also frame, cut out and add in a window on the back wall for a bit of natural light and the ability to open it a crack in summer. And who knows, maybe even add a shed roof on the north side of the roof so it’s not so cramped vertically, there’s some natural light and so that if the weather’s clear somebody cleaning out the attic storage would be rewarded with views of Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens and maybe even Mt. Rainier. We’ll see how much of that I actually do. The ridge vent, insulation and drywall would at least be prudent to do so the storage space has less extremes of temperature and humidity.

I also need to rerun a bit of the lighting wiring I’d roughed in so that it will be behind the hypothetical dry wall. That and running dedicated circuits in the garage for my wood shop (plus additional outlets) and for the freezer are on this afternoon’s to-do list. Currently if I’m running the right power tool, the fridge and/or air compressor cycles on and the garage door gets opened I think we pop a circuit breaker.

Also not repeating last year’s mistake (ie: the massive back breaking effort to hand press something like 130lbs of apples), today we swung by the apple farm and simply bought six gallons of cider. That was cheaper than buying apples. And saved eight hours of labor. So there’s five plus gallons of apple juice fermenting as well with the extra in the fridge for non-hard drinking because it’s just that time of year. The apple farm smelled like heaven. I skipped the campden tablets this time, because the store bought cider isn’t truly raw and I’m thinking it shouldn’t be too risky from a bacteria/fermentation standpoint to just dive right in with some biotin nutrient, pectic enzyme and wine yeast. We bought proper (plastic) champagne bottle corks and wire baskets since it seemed like our capper didn’t seal quite well enough to hold in the CO2 and get decent carbonation in the first batch. Or that’s my theory anyway currently. I may decide I need to supplement sugar and/or yeast at bottling time. We’ll see. It’s barely batch number two…it’ll be a while before we have the hard apple cider thing truly worked out.

I am tiiiiiired. Brewing’s hard work.

The fruit trees and berries on the north and east sides of the house should now get their summer irrigation from mother nature thanks to Portland Purple Water.

We got Blue Andalusian, Buff Orpington, Silver Lace Wyandotte, and Ameraucana. I think they’re roughly a week old.