Welcome to Ciderbrook

 Happy March, everyone!  It certainly started like a lion this year.  It was 50 degrees and beautiful yesterday, and today we woke up with an inch of snow and blustery 20 degree weather.  Winter in the northeast, I guess.  You never know what's going to happen from day to day.  Every year, we try to do a No Spend January, when we only spend on bare necessities like food and toiletries.  It helps us to reset our thinking, after a long holiday season of shopping and spending.  We did very well this January.  Not only did we not buy anything unnecessary, we also worked on eating down our pantry and spent very little on food too.   The other nice thing about a No-Spend-January is that it gives us a lot of time to think about what we do want to buy or spend our money on.  It's so easy to impulse buy something you think you need, and you may later find out that you didn't need it at all, or that something cheaper would have done...

Well, here we are in February!  Or as Garfield the cat once said, the armpit of the year.  February has always been the hardest month for me to get through, because winter's charm has started to wear off and spring is still so far away yet.  So I agree with Garfield's assessment. I suppose I owe you some Christmas pictures, since  Chad didn't post any of those in December.  It was nice to have a real proper Christmas here on our hobby farm.         It's been a rough winter for us.  After so much work last year, with moving, selling our Jamestown house, settling in, and building a new garden, I found myself totally burnt out by November.  Tired to the point where I could barely get myself to keep up with the basic chores like dishes and cooking.  So that's all I did, all though November, December, and about half of January.  And then, just as I began to feel better mentally, I got pretty sick and once again was just tr...

Hello, everyone!  Guest author Chad is here at the keyboard today.  It's been a busy fall season, and we're finally getting settled in for the winter.  Let's rewind the clock to mid-October and see what it looked like! Julie did as much work as time and weather permitted on the garden.  The berry hills are built, so the blueberry, blackberry, and strawberry plants can go in right away next year.  The fall rains had come and made everything so muddy that all this had to be shoveled up by hand, instead of creating the hills by plowing the trenches to the side.  It was a ton of work, but the harvest will be sweeter for it! Walking around the yard, we found some vivid toadstools growing on the embankment by the old shed.   Speaking of the old shed, our new one arrived!  The delivery man had a neat trailer.  It had an integrated lift/cart underneath,, so he could swing the whole trailer side-to-side by remote control, instead of having to perf...

 As I type, I have apples simmering on the stove for applesauce.  They were beginning to get soft, and they needed to be made into sauce pronto, which is pretty unusual.  I don't normally make applesauce until November.  But then, this has been an unusual year all around. The cold snap in early September tricked our trees into thinking fall had come, and they began to turn the most beautiful fall colors.  The colors peaked here around the first day of fall, September 22.  That's a full three weeks early!  It has been such a dry year, though, and I have heard that it has affected the fall colors.  Outside our valley, the colors are much muddier.  Why did we get treated to such pretty colors?    Chad said it's because God knew we would really appreciate them!  And we definitely do!  Fall is our very favorite season.  We love fall so much, that we got married on the first day of fall.  The first day of fall als...