I finally got a Starlink satellite dish...

It's not the greatest internet connection, but the download/upload speeds are WAY better than the cell phone we were using the last two years. Updates should be a little more often, now.

How about a tour of the gardens? Top of my list this month are the apple trees...

I have apples on the three older trees, though the middle one only seems to have done one half...

Last spring, after they had flowered, I went through and clipped off baby apples to leave one of each bunch. The apples are nice and large because of that...

I picked a bucket-full today...

That's more than half a bushel. I prob'ly have as many still on the trees. I wrapped most of them in newspaper and put them in the root cellar for storage...

Last year, I was still eating my apples well into the end of winter. Of course, I had to test them out for breakfast. Normally, it's pancakes, but today it was frozen waffles...

The asparagus was great this year. It's gone to seed now...

It was a hot summer here, so the tomatoes did much better than last year...

We have even more rippening on the deck...

The peppers did just as well. They've been able to rippen and turn colors, too...

There are squashes all over the place...

The beans and peas were OK. The carrots are doing well...

There were also radishes and beets in that patch.

This is Grumpy Frog...

If you ask nicely, maybe it will give you a tour of the gardens.

Yay!  My tomatoes are starting to sprout! I'll plant peppers next weekend, otherwise they'd already be an inch tall and out-growing the tomatoes.

Had a cracked egg in the drying rack the other day.  I thought it looked neat with the light shining in the window onto the back of it...

We have a freeze warning for the next two nights, so we pulled all the fruits we wanted to save.  I picked a bushel of apples from three trees...

Kelly picked the rest of the grapes...

And the rest of the tomatoes...

I made three quarts of sauce with a bunch of the earlier tomatoes yesterday...

The last couple years, we've been freezing the tomatoes and making sauce as needed.  The skin falls right off them when they thaw.  But, the freezers are pretty much full so there isn't room.

I found a picture of one of the last flutterbys...

We've had a couple more since the last post about them.

I wrapped up nearly all of the apples for storage.  With the leftovers, I made an apple crisp something for dinner...

Well, it's not strawberries, but it is way better than raspberries or blueberries...

I've taken a handful of pictures of the gardens. If you ask the frog nicely, maybe he'll let you see...

Took pictures of my pepper and tomato seedlings this morning.  The peppers are two (three?) weeks old...

I planted two types; bell peppers and jalapenos.  (I just bought seeds at the feed store when getting dog food last month, so I didn't get any special varieties this year.)  I forgot to mark in which half I planted which peppers.  Of course, one side is doing way better than the other.

Some of the peppers look a little crispy because they grow up into the light bulb I have above them.  I can't raise it too far because the tomatoes are only a week old...

Don't worry, they'll pass the peppers by the end of the month.

Note to self:  Plant all the seeds in the pack next year.  Wayne Gretzky once said, "You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take."  I planted one-or-two seeds in each pepper cell thinking I would transplant any seconds into open cells.  (Which I have.)  Turns out one of the two types didn't sprout well enough to do that.  Looking at the peppers, I decided to plant the whole pack of tomato seeds and ended up with four-or-five seeds per cell.  In the picture above, I've already done one round of thinning and have reduced each cell down to the two best seedlings.  I'll thin down to one each next week.  It would have been better to do the same with the peppers.  I keep the best six of each for my buckets and give away any extras.  It's now too late to start the seeds left in the packs.

Well, we didn't need to wait long. Kelly looked into the container that held the chrysalis and said, "We've got a butterfly!"  I put it out on a sunflower plant in the garden to stretch its wings and get used to the real world.  The two spots on the hind wings means it's a male.

Kelly was trimming back the squash vines today.  Luckily, I saw this hanging off a leaf as I was collecting the clippings for the chickens...  It's less than an inch tall.  It's the chrysalis of a Monarch butterfly.  When the caterpillar is ready, it turns into this, and reforms into a butterfly inside.  After 10-14 days, it will emerge.  I cut a strip an inch wide from the leaf, put it in a blueberry pint container, and have it sitting on a shelf.

Well, spring is on its way...  We were up to 61° over the weekend.  The snow is melting, and the flying beaver are back...

I started my pepper seeds today...

In a week-or-so, I'll start my tomatoes. They pop faster than the peppers. Last year, I started them at the same time and had trouble keeping the light at the right height for both of them.  If you go back to this article, you can see the difference in the eleven-day seedlings.