It’s been a quiet Christmas season this year. Not quite our quietest, since we do have five puppies in the living room. We still have one available, along with many Mack Hill Farm calendars. The maple candy and the last of the syrup sold out for Christmas.
Winter weather finally arrived yesterday, despite forecasts of continued warmth. Weather.com missed by 10F yesterday and 15 today. We did get a white Christmas though. We’re burning the hardwood slab from the sawmill these days. Much of it is several years old, and it burns hot and fast. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten that much heat out of the little stove in the bedroom. Between the cold weather and the puppy door in the living room, we need all the heat we can get. The only downside is that it burns out fast, and the stove can easily go out unless one of us has insomnia.
As you can see, I’ve got the LibraryThing widget turned back on. Lisa and I both think it’s kind of fun. It’s only showing our gardening and farming books. By the way, I’m not allowed to ask you to use my site, but I can certainly mention that if you click through somebody’s Amazon.com affiliate icon when you go to place an order at Amazon, that someone will get a roughly 4% commission at no cost to you.
The gardenporn seed catalogs have already started to arrive. It’s time to figure out what and how much to grow in 2012. Danny did a number on all too much of our garden this year, so in large part, I think we’ll try the same things again. Fortunately, 2010 was a fantastic garden year and we still have a lot of it left.
We once again brought our window box herbs into the house, and have them under florescent grow lights. I cannot recommend this enough. We could buy fresh sage and rosemary through the winter, but not oregano or thyme. Fresh vs. dried oregano is day vs. night, and our sage is better than the supermarket stuff too. The electric bill is about six bucks a month, and we get the heat, and a buck or two back in other lights that we don’t turn on.