Spring Shopping Trip

Winter was really over up here in the northwest right around March 21. Since then I have been picking and eating wild stinging nettles! What a treat after spending a winter with almost no green vegetables in my diet. I feel healthier than I have for years now and I have to attribute that to the moose meat, home grown potatoes and other vegetables that I have been eating all winter.

I had a bull moose feeding in my yard for most of the month of March. He was eating the bark off of a poplar tree that I had cut early in the winter. In the photo you can just see small bumps rising from his head which will develop into huge antlers during the next few months.

I hitch-hiked down the highway to Stewart on Monday, then down to Terrace this morning. Now I am 250 miles from home. Terrace is the nearest real city close to my home and I can get my supplies for the next year all in one shopping trip. The goods will travel up the road by freight truck, then I'll just have to back-pack everything in. I'd rather do it now before the big hatch of mosquitoes. Actually saw my first mosquito on March 26. These early mosquitoes are big, dumb, and slow, and not nearly as numerous as the ones that will arrive in June and July.

Got some of my garden in and some things are actually coming up already. Rhubarb and garlic, radishes, some onions. The next month will be busy for me as I work more of the virgin soil into an expanded garden and get it planted. Most of the ground that I have cleared during February and March had an over-story of Alders (20 foot tall, nitrogen fixing trees), Red Elderberry bushes, stinging nettles and cow parsnips with some wild delphinium and chocolate lily (rice root). It is beautiful soil, and a real joy to work in. The larger alders are becoming firewood and the rest is being composted in large brush piles, which, in this area, should break down in just two or three years.

I'll be hitching back up the highway in a couple of days,  and so my next posting may not be until June maybe. Love you all!