Karen's Garden Delights Journal
1st week of April 2011

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This week we are relying on the ancient adage, April showers bring May flowers. More than one day this week my wash has been double cleaned as it hung on the line during a rain shower and the mud that gets tracked in the house surely makes us long for flowers. I'm sure the May flowers are fairing fine but my concern though is for the June wedding flowers that aren't in the ground yet. Usually by this time of year the gardens are disked and we are busy planting. That won't be an option this year for perhaps another week. While we wait, some of the early tomatoes in the window are blooming and even starting to set fruit. Some will need to go into the greenhouse soon and others will be ready for Water Walls when the garden dries out enough to start working. The greenhouse table and the flourescent light table are filling to overflowing as we wait on planting weather to move the flats of broccoli and lettuce outdoors to make room for peppers and tomatoes inside. At least there is some work that can be done indoors as we wait on the sunshine.

We are excited about our new piece of kitchen equipment, a GrainMaker mill. For years we have ground our flour in the Vita-Mix and it has worked pretty well except the flour is somewhat coarse and heats up plenty. This mill will make fine flour, not get hot and is adaptable to do cornmeal, peanut butter and more. Eventually we want to hook it up to an electric motor but until then, there is plenty of kid energy around needing an outlet. We use both hard white or red wheat and locally grown spelt in most of our baking and are very excited over our first few baking adventures with the fine flour. Here is a batch of gingersnaps that didn't last very long and our weekly breakfast coffee cake was delightfully fluffy.

This has been a busy month for making paper and cards. Last week I delivered a wedding order for heart seed favors, started making wedding invitation paper for a bride (brown grocery bags with onion skins and grass) and spent evenings finishing an order of plantable cards for P Graham Dunn. Pictured are some of the over 100 cards we made to fill that order. We made a batch of blue seed hearts for a baby shower and I even got a unique request for seed favors to pass out at a funeral which we needed to complete on short notice. Fortunately, we had the right color of seed paper on hand and we scurried to cut 80 hearts and tie on labels. The daughter wanted to give something that brought hope at her mother's funeral, what a meaningful idea!