Celebrate the Small Things: A Good Week

Just saying "Hi" and wishing you a lovely spring week. I certainly have been celebrating one here (with the exception of today's wind and thunderstorm, but I won't go into that).

View driving into Clarkston, WA. Hell's Gate Marina on the Snake River where Vince and I sometimes sail on our sailboat, "Duet." Explorers Lewis Meriwether and William Clark explored this region and river in the early 1800s, and thus the names of our two towns, Lewiston and Clarkston came to be. A great place to visit for all you Pacific Northwest history buffs out there.

  The weather has been lovely in Eastern Washington, and the Palouse hills are already greening up from the winter wheat. Temperatures are in the 50s and 60s. Spring is definitely on the way. The Master Gardening class I have been attending once a week has been wonderful. Gardeners in the Lewiston-Clarkson valley (where classes are held 45 minutes away) are already gardening! Their season (zone 6) is about four to six weeks ahead of the rest of us (in zone 5) living on the plateau above. Boo! I'm 'green' with envy :).

Close up of Hell's Gate Marina (there is also a nice RV park here and Hell's Gate State Park farther down the road). The hills surrounding will turn green soon, but then quickly turn brown over the summer when temperatures reach the 90s and higher.

Winter sowing in mini greenhouses actually worked.
Planted Feb 16 when temperatures were still in the 30s at night.

Here on the Palouse on the plateau, I'm excited to begin gardening again and already have a garden shed planned (thanks to Vince's willingness to set up one). I'm a bit behind starting my seedlings indoors but the grow lights are set up and ready. My experiment sowing romaine lettuce and mesclun outdoors in mini-greenhouses actually worked (see photo). I have plenty of starts for transplanting. A Master Gardener suggested I try this method. You can't see the green shoots in the photo, but believe me they are there. I'll transplant later in April.

Also drove to Spokane this week, which is about 90 miles north of us. Vince had an early morning eye appointment, and I needed to picked up my red worms for my new vermi-composter.

View from road driving to Spokane at sunrise. The fields are already turning green.
What a beautiful day to drive!

I was pretty nervous about the worm composting process, but I'm happy to report the worms are thriving, and now eating a potpourri of chopped pineapple leaves, lettuce, bread and other fruit and vegetable scraps. At the end of the month, I should have a bucket's worth of fresh compost for the garden and a new batch of worms. The process is ingenious. I water and feed the worms with kitchen scraps, and brown material like leaves and old newspaper and they produce this marvelous soil for the garden. What a great way to recycle!

Vermi-Composter. Three more bins go on
top as the worms build up the soil.

My new worms. Most are hidden underneath.

Happy Weekend everyone!! 

'Celebrate the small things' was started by Viklit at Scribblings of An Aspiring Author. Sign up below. Meet some terrific bloggers!