Island Mama

We have one very small tradition for St. Patrick’s Day. It involves potatoes, dirt, and Guinness.

Spring is truly here. This was a few days ago — there are so many more blossoms open now on this tree, and others are joining in.

It’s January, yes. It’s winter, yes.

But it’s mild, and it feels like so much spring, and we all needed to spend some time outside. We worked hard this morning, gathering branches and transporting them (in the truck, the boys love that part!) to the other end of the yard. I even managed to resist the urge to weed the floor of the little forest (the creeping blackberries, they take over!).

After lunch, we burned.

And the boys painted rocks. It keeps them out of the fire, you know.

Luckily we have an almost endless supply of them, because they can both paint a lot.

Some of Timothy’s works of art:

And some of Ben’s:

The rocks will be strewn about the little forest, making paths or hiding in bushes. Maybe I will have to weed after all.

We even got a little garden prep done. Timothy helped me weed and turn over last year’s garlic bed in preparation for planting out the strawberry runners.

Rather belatedly, pictures of our tree this year.

(I’m trying to catch up, and trying not to allow the fact that I have all these outdated but unposted posts stop me from posting at all.)

In the field, it looked big, but not huge. We cut it off a good 4′ from the bottom.

It was still really tall and required a ladder to light the top.

Not the best pictures, but these are the only ones I managed to get. It’s full of old ornaments and homemade ones, by us and by the kids, and some we’ve found at thrift stores.

We’ve had some really cold weather during the last month or two, and we made an interesting discovery: when it gets really really cold, like stays-below-freezing-for-many-days sort of cold, all those yogurt containers the kids left outside had filled with rainwater and frozen, from the top down, in a really fascinating pattern.

When you find one that still has water at the bottom, you can *carefully* remove the chunk of ice at the top and turn it upside down, and find these fingers of ice that were reaching down into the water.

They remind me of fir trees.

A whole frozen forest of fir trees.

Today seemed like the perfect day for a walk on the beach — mild, gray, but not raining; tide on its way out.

Perfect time to explore some of the amazing driftwood structures people build here.

This one was shaped like an igloo, complete with entrance tunnel.

The kids could fit inside, but we couldn’t. Once they crawled through the entrance, they could even stand up — it was actually quite spacious. I could stick the camera through a gap in the wall though.

And then there was climbing…

And digging in the sand…

And finally, the construction of a crane using found materials…

Some of the driftwood is really amazing to look at up close….

It’s not spring quite yet, but we’ve started to be able to get outdoors again, and it feels good. This is the second Sunday in a row we’ve had a nice bonfire. Last week we even had our first outdoor meal of the year, by candle-, fire- and flashlight.

We’re getting some cleaning up done, some garden prep, and lots of fresh air. It’s good to be making progress already.

The boys always have fun wandering around out back, digging dirt or carrying stones around or riding tricycles. Or sometimes, just sitting watching the fire.

I enjoy sitting watching the fire too. (And watching Eric dig holes for our new fruit trees.) Although, I was also really thinking about spring, and working on garden plans and our big seed order. We’ll be starting to plant in just a few weeks!

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On another note, I feel like I’ve been away from blogging for a long time. We’ve had a traumatic and eventful few months and it’s been hard to post about the little stuff.

At the end of September, my sister-in-law in Boston passed away unexpectedly. We spent a full four weeks travelling in October — first to Boston, then on a previously planned trip to N. Ireland and Spain, some of which was obviously painful, some was fun, but overall we were stressed and emotional. In December the 3 year old daughter of some of our closest friends was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She’s now halfway through radiation treatment and, aside from some temporary nerve damage from the surgery, she seems to be doing reasonably well.

And, finally, of course, there’s this:

Yes, we’re having another baby! We found out over Thanksgiving weekend. This photo is from a little over two weeks ago. I’m now 14 weeks, out of the first trimester, starting to mostly feel better. Baby is due in August.

I hope to be back here more often now, with more updates about the garden, the boys, the baby… and hopefully there’ll be more crafting to update about too. With the level of barely-functioning I’ve been at since mid-December, there’s been precious little to share in that area.

It’s the end of summer.

We spent some time at the beach, although not enough this year.

We grew vegetables and flowers. The garden has been a major part of our life this summer.

We picked blackberries and made cheesecake. Blackberry mint cheesecake.

And now it’s fall. We’ve had three fires inside in the last few days, needing to warm the house up and feel cozy. And a bonfire a couple weeks ago too. I’m a little sad summer’s over, it was short, but I’m ready. Ready for apples and fires in the woodstove and bonfires outside and boots and falling leaves and, yes, the gray, the drizzle. Ready to move our life inside and read books, play games, do crafts, build forts and train tracks.

Well, actually, two girls. Two female kiwi vines.

We moved into this house last September, and the previous owner told us the two kiwi vines out back were supposed to be a male and a female, but since they’d never produced anything in the seven years they’d been there, she thought, perhaps, they were, in fact, both the same. Two males, or two females, she didn’t know.

(Quick kiwi lesson: The female bears fruit after about 5 – 9 years, but needs a male plant, of any age, for pollination. The only way to tell the sex of a kiwi vine is to look at the flowers when they bloom in late spring/early summer.)

We waited and waited and waited for flowers, hoping for at least one female so we might have a chance at fresh kiwi fruit this year or next. We even planted a male in the spring, just in case, but the slugs ate it.

A couple of days ago, the first flower opened on one of the vines. I looked up the pictures online and discovered, to our great delight, it is a female! And today, the second vine opened flowers and it’s also female!

Now all we need is a male to pollinate them. It can be done by hand — we just need to find someone with some flowering male kiwi vines who can donate a few flowers to kiss our flowers and hopefully we’ll have fruit!

And next year, we can try planting a male again and coddle it a bit more to ensure survival and a crop of garden fresh kiwi fruit!

We happened to be sitting outside a few days ago when there arose a great squawking and flapping and fluttering and lo, the babies left the nest. All at once, and amid great excitement. There were two adult robins zooming around making a lot of noise, and I’m not entirely sure if they were yelling at the babies to kick them out of the nest (sorry, encourage them to take flight), or if they were worried that they weren’t ready and were yelling at them to stay put.

Either way, the babies left the nest and we saw at least one of them actually flying away.

There’s just one lonely little egg left.

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So much for every day, huh. Oh well. I’ll keep trying.