Mid Winter

Even though we're in the depths of winter, there's plenty to do at the farm. And of course, this is Nor Cal winter, meaning it drops almost to freezing sometimes! OMG! We haven't had much of a hard freeze yet this year, and it's already unseasonably sunny and warm. And we could still use some more rain, although we've had a bit, and a lot of damp fog and dew.
Delina and Jae came to visit. This was Jae's first visit to the farm and we sent them home with broccoli and eggs.

Bill and Laura came to visit also. You can see how bleak and wintery it looks.

So we have to stand around the fire to stay warm.

Speaking of staying warm...the guys pretend warm themselves at the candle lantern. Why are we sitting out here? Because I just sprayed all the trees (with organic dormant oil). This will prevent peach leaf curl and rust on the fruit trees. This was on 1-11, and we shouldn't need another spraying.

I wish I could have grown this beauty, but I bought it at the market from Grub. I am still fermenting everything in sight. This guy is destined to be kim chee.

I also did some bar mix and some daikon-carrot mixes. Everything but the lemons are in the fridge by now, but the lemons need to ferment at least a month.

The big adventure is that the dryer broke. I had carefully washed all my outerwear after using the spray, so I had a big pile of wet clothes, including my fleece jeans. And... no dryer. Lemme tell you, it's no easy feat to air-dry fleece-lined jeans. The washer was on its last legs too, so we had little choice but to replace them both. We got lucky on a dinged set at Ginnos for a reasonable price. So... at that point, it didn't make any sense not to completely make over the laundry room. First step was to get everything off the shelves. I started in on the painting even before the shelves were down.

The back walls are the same turquoise as the mudroom, while the other two walls are the gold from the kitchen.

Here you can see both colors.

The inside door frame is Jane's lovely faux, and it looks great surrounded by the turquoise.

The old flooring was in tatters, so we replaced that also. Yeah, these are more cheap peel-and-stick tiles but hey, we just bought a lot of stuff and we're broke!

It matches the rest of the mudroom floor so it looks good.

Now the room is all finished and awaiting the machines.

The finished product looks great. In fact, it looked so good we couldn't stand to put those ratty shelves back up, so we're going to get a couple of inexpensive cabinets instead.

It looks much better with all the appliances behind cabinet doors.

This whole project took 5 days, but it wasn't all work. We had brunch at the pub and tried Hop Hunter for the first time. It's our favorite new beer since Flipside. Hop Hunter uses steam-distilled hop oil for amazingly fresh floral hop taste.