kareina

Today is the only day this week that I had time to do more harvesting of the produce of our estate, and I was torn between drying more nettles (so far I have one jar full, and we went through three or four jars last winter), or more black currants (the large jar is about 3/4 full and we went through the full jar and a small over-flow jar last winter). But I didn't want to dry both at once in the dehydrator. However, we don't yet have any of the black currants in the freezer, so when I went out the door at 18:00 to start harvesting, I decided to collect both and dry the nettles.

Since there are lots of tiny nettles starting to grow in in the areas we did landscaping this summer I started with them, and managed to fill one yoghurt bucket with tiny nettle leaves in about 45 minutes before I ran out of areas near the house that needed nettles removed. Then I went down to the black currant bushes, and in another 45 minutes filled 3 yoghurt buckets with berries. By that point I was out of empty buckets in my bag, and the light was starting to fade,so I went in to the house and washed up the nettles and popped them into the dehydrator. One well packed yoghurt bucket of leaves fills only 3.5 trays of the dehydrator, and the last time that I tried drying such small nettle leaves it was less than two hours to get them done. Since it was only 18:00 by the time I pressed the on-switch on the dehydrator I realized that I would have time to get those done and put the black currants in before bed. So I cleaned the berries and set them into the fridge for later and amused myself on the computer for a couple of hours (and an extra half an hour--I lost track of time). Sure enough, when I went to check on them the nettles were ready to come out, so I put them away, cleaned the racks, and then did the boiling treatment on the currants. I have found that if one puts the berries straight into the dehydrator without pre-treating them they take ages to dry, but if one pops them into boiling water for a minute first the skins crack, and they dry in only 12 to 24 hours.

When I did the last batch of berries, on Sunday, I saved the water in which I had boiled the berries, as it has turned a lovely shade of pink, and I decided that there was no point in throwing out that much nutrition, when I could use it. I had enough to fill two glass milk bottles with it, one of which I had used up before today (it is particularly nice as the liquid on my muesli in the mornings, instead of my usual water). But since I still had the second bottle full left, and we have only two glass milk bottles in the fridge, I decided to put that bottle into the pot for boiling the berries today, along with some fresh water. This time I also took the liquid that spun out of the berries in the salad spinner back into the boiling water. As a result the two milk bottles that just went into the fridge full of cooled and strained berry-boiled water are a much darker, more vibrant shade of pink than the last batch. It will be interesting to see how it tastes on my muesli in the morning.

In other news, I went to see my physical therapist for the first time in a very long time yesterday. I have had, over the past few months, a few occasions when I went to move one of my legs and something felt wrong in my hip and kinda hurt a little, but shaking the leg out made it feel better, and each time it happened, other than thinking "oh, that is kinda a bad sign", I didn't really think much of it, and didn't even bother to make a note of it. However, on Saturday night's yoga session while moving from one lunge to another, my hip gave a sharper flash of discomfort, accompanied by a popping sound that was loud enough that I heard it even though I wasn't wearing my hearing aids. It clearly wasn't something really major as I could still move my leg, but whatever happened was still enough of a problem that it kinda hurt to move the leg certain directions, even though there was no pain or discomfort when I hold still, but I had to be very careful which way I rolled over when sleeping that night so as not to engage that muscle/tendon, or it would hurt.

Therefore I emailed my physical therapist first thing Sunday morning to ask if he had any appointments available this week, or, at least, soon. Much to my delight, when I checked mail at 23:00 on Sunday evening, he had just replied saying "how about Tuesday?", so I promptly replied saying "perfect".

The hip continued to require careful, gentle movements during the day on Sunday, but by Monday was so back to normal that I didn't hesitate to do acroyoga with Ellinor, and didn't have any problems with the hip, either. But, of course, I went to the appointment anyway, as it wasn't something that I want to have happen again. Given that the last time I saw him about a hip issue he said the problem was underdeveloped muscles in my butt (when compared to muscles in my legs), I wasn't really surprised when he said pretty much the same thing this time--thought it is a different expression of the problem, and he gave me different exercises for it. Hopefully this time I will not only strengthen those muscles enough to keep this from happening again, but I will also learn how to use those muscles all of the time, rather than doing movements that should use those muscles with leg muscles instead.

This morning I sat on my porch and enjoyed the view. Spring is far enough along to show the difference between the various trees that grow leaves. The rowan are furthest along, with enough leaves that they are already looking rather green. The birch are next, with a gentle yellowish green hint of colour showing. The third type, which has a greyer trunk than the birch, but I don't know what they are, hasn't really got any leaves to speak of yet.

But the day was rainy, so I devoted myself to indoor tasks. I have now started a pair of pattens, did lots of laundry, including the Pillows! I am so grateful to P&P (the local count and countess), who gifted us with a dryer their house came with that they never use--I haven't been able to wash pillows since before we moved, since one really needs a dryer if one wants to do so, a bit of tablet weaving, and even some reading.

Around mid-day I noticed that the rain had turned to snow! So, of course, I went for a short walk to celebrate. Yes, it is late May, and no, the snow had no chance of surviving in the warm weather (+5 C), and it melted as soon as it touched the ground, yet the sight of large white flakes falling from the sky always makes me happy.

Then, in the early evening the rain stopped and the sun came out, so I decided to try for another walk. This time, rather than going out and back I decided to try a short loop, and turned onto the mostly cleared area under the power lines. This worked just fine for the first part of the way--not much new growth yet, so the walking was easy enough. Then I reached an area where a wide ditch was busy draining the forest to the right. The ditch was much to wide to jump, and the water in it much too deep to consider crossing--when wearing rubber boots one doesn't usually wish to enter water that much deeper than the boots.

Therefore I decided to turn and walk along the ditch to see if there was a place I could cross upstream. Not only wasn't there an opportunity any time soon, the ground quickly got wetter and wetter, so instead I angled back towards the left, got onto a very wet road that crossed an even wetter field, and looped back home again. A fun adventure, but not the loop I had intended.

When I got back from that I decided I hadn't had enough time outside, so I harvested the nettles which are starting to come in behind the strawberry patch. I got just enough to fill the food dehydrator. We ran out of the stash of dried and frozen nettles early in the winter, so this summer I will try to dry and freeze much more of it, in hopes that I can harvest enough to last the winter. considering that I am likely to start using the dried and frozen nettles pretty much right away, they being more convenient when one wants to add just a handful to what one is cooking, this is a challenging goal.

Tomorrow lord_kjar gets back from his trip to Göteberg, where he had a short course, and then stayed for the weekend to spend time with C, since he was in town. after he returns we can start working on the earth cellar again. I am really looking forward to that.

This weekend (and the week before it, too), have been busy ones on the home improvment front. We have painted one of the walls in the downstairs room a lovely dark blue (and now need to find a source for some silver metalic paint to decorate it, so if you have any suggestions on that part please let me know--bonus points if the source is in Sweden). While at it we also painted the inside of the door to the downstairs water closet the same dark blue, and it looks MUCH better (it had been a dreadful shade of greenish brown before getting scratched up and dammaged looking, and I have been wanting to do something about it since we moved in). That tiny room had been painted a pale baby blue by some previous house owner, and the tiles behind the sink are a similar shade of dark blue, so the blue door looks like it was all meant to go together with a minium of effort on our part. (note: I wouldn't have chose the baby blue, but since the room is only large enough for a sink and a toilet it doesn't look so bad, and I can live with it for however many years elaspe between now and when that room makes it back to the top of the priority list.)

Then we painted the floor of the downstairs room a dark grey, nicely covering all of the white spots from where we had filled in the holes in the concrete where the raised floor (that we took out due to mold) had been attached. Once that dries we can put things back into the room and have it as a useable space again--and more useable than it was before we ripped the floor out, too, since there is no mold left in it.

But most of the weekend was spent outside, enjoying the nice weather and moving strawberries. When we bought the house one of our neighbous had some strawberry patches on our field, and when he heard that we had plans smooth out the field he moved most of them to another property, leaving behind two small patches he didn't want anymore. Since the large rotating tool that we had planed to use on the field was broken last summer those patches were left where they were, and I happily ate (and froze for later enjoyment) strawberries for much of the summer. But this year that tool has been repaired, so when we go fetch the tractor that will come along too, so the berries had to move. Therefore we made a new home for them up on the hill closer to the house, right behind the shed:



Some of the raspberries that surrived winter after their late-autum transplant from a friend's yard to ours are also visible. I suspect that I will like hanging out in this corner of the yard later this summer when the berries are ripe. Must put in a bench...

One can also see the stump of the tree that we had to cut down. Last summer we noticed that it had a few dead branches, which, when we cut them off saw that they were soft and rotted already. Therefore, when none of the branches put out leaves this summer we were not so surprised. When we cut it down we could see that the tree hadn't actually finished dying--there was still water in one small quadrant fo the trunk, but the rest of it was in bad shape. So it is better to have taken it down now, rather than leaving it to fall on its own, especially as it was growing quite close to the shed (which, as you can see, is rather in need of repair and paint, but there are so many other projects on the list we may not get to that this year).

Today and tomorrow lord_kjar is in Stockholm for a class for work, so I have been continuing making progress on the list on my own. Since dropping him off at the airport this morning I fueled the car, washed it and vacumed and cleaned out the interior, did the final coat of paint on the above mentioned floor, spent an hour working on the walkway to the earth cellar, harvested some nettles which were growning too near the smultrons, cooked them up and put them into silicon muffin cups to freeze so that I can add them to recipies later.