This past week has been pretty busy. We had work done on the house through mass save, which took a full 6 days. The hope is that now the house and the finished space of the barn is better insulated and will help lower our energy bills (especially oil) and just overall be more comfortable. That also included sheet-rocking the ceiling of the barn garage which was primarily to help insulate the upstairs, but I think it will be nice if we start to use that space for a workshop space (power tools, etc.). But now we have a ton of holes to properly spackle, sand and repaint…

My mom also came last weekend and helped us by painting some of the kitchen cabinets. They’re looking really good (where they’re finished…)

We’re also trying to decide on how to do the walls in the loom room. I really want pink, partially inspired by this place I stayed at in France, but it has been hard to land on the right pink…

We’re trying some faux finishes too (to match France), which luckily my mom is able to do so we can see if we like them.

In terms of the garden, we keep finding massive asparagus! It’s awesome! So far we have found 12 plants, but I think there are more. I’ve started marking them with caution/road stakes so we don’t step on them.

We also set up one of our raised beds and transplanted our broccoli and sowed our lettuce. I covered them with some mesh and clips, and weighed down the edges with bricks. Hopefully this keeps out the deer and rabbits.

Speaking of animals, we’ve seen a a flock of turkeys come almost every day this week. I hope they’re eating some of the ticks. And then we saw a porcupine! It was hilarious (well, Jeremy felt bad), because the first time we saw it, it was climbing up a bush that could not sustain its weight and was grabbing on like the hanging in there cat and fell over in slow motion. It was clearly fine because we saw it in the tree the next day, but it was hilarious.

The plants have also been growing. We have about 20 tomato plants at the moment – San Marzano, Sun gold, some Roma variety and Berkley. I’m most excited about the Sun gold and San Marzano (I generally don’t like Roma tomatoes).

And today I spent most of the day starting my Piet Oudolf style garden. I had echinops, echinacea, feathertop grass, and Oxford blue salvia seedlings to plant. I still have a ton more, but some will have to go in the bed because I don’t have the time (or energy) to keep clearing sod (we don’t have any power tools for gardening at the moment). I’ve also started slowing down on new seedlings while I figure out where they’re all going to go! But I have a bunch in the works. I’m particularly excited about some of biennials like the double black hollyhock and white flowered verbascum, but I have to keep reminding myself they won’t flower this year.

And today we also went to our first town activity – the small and antique engine show. It was cute! It was like a very mini Brimfield. I wish that sears tractor was viable for us to use.