Cleaning & Lighting Fy Nyth's Wood Stove

To help answer some of the questions I've been asked about my Grey Stove, I shot a video this morning of emptying the ash and then lighting my stove. For more info on this stove, see my posts about the installation and my general review of the stove here and here.  Enjoy and if you have any other questions, please ask!

The Anticipation Spring Brings

Despite waking to a dreary morning outside that rapidly turned into a full downpour, there being mud everywhere there is not still a snow pile, and the general grayness, I like spring better here in my little clearing better than I ever have since living in WY.

Every day some new thing pops out of the ground or shoots out little buds. When I first saw my garlic shoots sticking up through the snow a few days ago, I was so excited I had to go back and look at them two more times that day just to see if they were still growing! Crazy I know, and probably equivalent to trying to get a watched pot to boil, but sometimes things really do grow that fast. 

Last night for the first, I saw two of my rhubarb plants shooting up through their mulch. Even though I couldn't even find the other ones last night, this morning the other two are up as well! Meaning that all four of the plants I put in last year survived the winter.

Daffodils are faithfully coming up everywhere I planted them last fall. Even in the spots I totally forgot I had planted them. About half of the edge of my clearing should be blooming yellow in a few weeks!

Then there are the cherry and apple tree buds swelling every day. Parsnips shooting out tender looking little leaves. Creeping thyme with it's mini dusky green leaves crawling across the dirt. The wide brighter green of salvia and iris coming back up. Tiny little pairs of leaves marking the spots where alyssum seeds fell last year. The yard gradually developing a green haze. And so on. It's just so exciting to find a new live thing that made it through our winter every day!

Now I'm just itching to plant new stuff for this spring! But I am still waiting on some seeds that are in the mail, and it's still a little early for most things. We could easily get some very hard frosts yet since our last frost date isn't till July...