An oops, and starting to look ahead to what we should seed start.

As usual, it is expected to be snowing today. At least today it's expected to be a light snow with only a couple inches. While that is certainly it's own variety of frustrating due to the difficulty of clearing it when I can clear it at all, this time I am glad for a break from the heavy snow that we've been seeing lately. While this isn't an excessive amount of snow for a winter, getting it all at once isn't my favorite method. It's going to be very cold again for the next couple weeks which is to be expected for this time of year.


Yesterday the Lady of the House and I both made a mistake of feeling like the weather was nice
enough that we didn't need to check on the rabbit water bottles meaning they didn't get changed from when they got put out at 6:30 AM until after I brought them in at 10:30 PM. When I brought them in they were frozen solid and distended due to having frozen before the rabbits could have gotten any water out of them. We warmed them promptly, and then put them back out when they did get some good water. It seemed nice enough out and with sun melting some of the snow on the roof the sound of dripping water convinced us that it was ok, and we were wrong. No serious consequences in this case, but we did cause suffering to the rabbits for the day so we are going to avoid that in the future. It is important to make sure that rabbits have constant fresh water, and trusting how the weather feels to us was a mistake we aren't going to be making again.

We need to get started preparing for the early start plants we need to start. This year since we're not going to be doing tomatoes it's mostly going to be peppers starting soon. I haven't decided exactly what we're going to be doing this year, but I can say that Limon Peppers are going to be a large part of it since I like having good storing peppers around that have a good flavor. I do want to try doing some more creative and interesting peppers and maybe making some spice mixes if we do better with peppers this year than we did last year. The Thai Firecrackers are probably going to be grown again which is a good thing. For the really high heat peppers we're probably going to have to keep them in longer than we did last year to get any production out of them. Given that I really enjoy Habeneros and Ghost Peppers I'm probably going to have to keep them inside longer. I'm also going to have to consider how to properly isolate the peppers so I can save seeds this year from the Limon Peppers for future years without having mixes. While having mixes can be fun, I don't want to mess with the productivity and heat of the Limons right now. Maybe in the future I can have fun with that, but not this year.

Other than peppers I'm probably going to be trying to do more with the leafy greens and tubers this
year since we aren't doing tomatoes. Squash are another obvious one since we are going to have space to grow them in, and enjoy squash. Sadly the squash we'd saved for seeds last year got used so we'll have to get new seeds for that. I hope to have time to continue expanding our growing room this year instead of just resting with the space we have from the past. Rebuilding the hugulkulture/lasagna bed is going to be an early priority in the spring to see if we can use that this year. We may actually have to bring in soil for that one because it hasn't been composting over the winter, and we don't have as much rabbit manure as we did in the past. That said, I can't think ahead too far, too much snow on the ground to do that!