A new favorite dog photo!

I am finally taking a morning to download, view, sort, and label photos that have been in my camera for weeks and weeks. I won't get them all done this morning, but I found this one of Phoebe taken the morning of February 27 as we waded out into our last 'big snow'. We had 'only' 6 inches but it was on top of 2 inches of slush that came down first, so it was very challenging walking, and when I used the word 'wading', that is rather what it felt like.

We did lose power, but fortunately not for days and days. We can heat part of our house well enough with wood heat, so we were fine, and it was a great morning to be out looking at what the storm did to the trees on our property. Needless to say, we have lots of clean up to do, but thankfully, not too much major damage to living trees. Everything that came down will become fuel for the next time we need wood heat.

Phoebe just had a wonderful time, what else can I say? She was really disappointed when I finally needed to go in to warm up my feet (even without power or heat in the house). I'm so glad I snapped this one pix when her head was not down in the snow, so I could remember how she looked in motion. I'm both surprised and happy that it came out fairly in focus! I put this photo on the top of my blog this morning but within my post today so it stays in the archives, too. Yes, this post gets tagged under 'Dogs'. :)

Phoebe, Snow Dog!

I started this session of photo sorting this morning with the goal of getting the photos organized that I took yesterday when we tapped our maple trees for the first time! We don't have any sugar maples but we do have several good size healthy red maples. Their sap is more dilute than that from sugar maples, so it will take longer to concentrate into maple syrup, but first up is using the sap to make some beer. I have already tasted it. It is very clear, it looks just like water, and is just sweet enough for me with a vegetable smell to it! It was very refreshing, and just to experiment, I actually used some to make coffee this morning. I never sweeten my tea or coffee, so this was an experiment. By using only ~1 cup of of the sap with about 3 cups of water, my coffee was "just right", different, but not too sweet. 

So look for more photos to come. I'll post a few here and when I really do get organized, I'll post more of them on our farm's Facebook page. 

Here is a quote from the top of our farm's website that seems pertinent today:

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow (like maple sap in your coffee!) - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD