We cleaned out one of our upper storage cabinets to devote the entire space to the ever increasing collection of wine tools, chemicals, cleaners, corks and hoses. Everything has a spot now and is neatly labeled and out of little ones’ reach.
Ingredients:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Cream together the butter, white sugar and brown sugar.
Add the eggs and vanilla and mix well.
Blend in the oatmeal, then add the flour, mixed with salt and baking soda – mix well.
Add the raisins, coconut and nuts and blend together.
Drop by large teaspoonfuls onto lightly greased cookie sheet (or use parchment paper)
Bake at 350 for 10 minutes (a little longer if the cookies are larger), until just slightly browned.
It seems that we are spending every nice afternoon and weekend trimming and weed-whipping our blackberries. The established rows (all 5 of them), were not that difficult, since we did some preliminary trimming and tying up last fall. For those rows, none of the branches could reach the ground, re-root and send runners. We snipped off all the old “ties” and re-tied the branches with baler twine.
But the other 8 rows are a different story – there we need to find the plant (next to the irrigation hoses close to an emitter), weed around it, and trim it back. Jeff likes to call this “aggressive trimming” – he wants all the energy of the plant to go into root development, not into any sort of fruiting effort for this year. Plants in these 8 rows are only in their second year. After all this, we then weed-whip around the rows until everything looks perfectly clean. Only problem is that once in a while, the weed-whip tears off one of the emitters – it does not break them, but we need to make sure that we stick the emitter back in before the water is turned on.
We spent most of the day cleaning the upper fence row from the “grape” field, burning brush and sticks too small or dead to use for firewood. While Lars and Tina worked on the fence row, Jeff continued plowing the field – the ground is just soft enough for the tractor to easily pull the plow through (in third gear even). It is already looking so much better than last year at this time!
All week long, Jeff has been working on pointing in the barn and on Friday, he and Jens finished replacing the remaining old supporting posts with new posts. They jacked up the wall with the windows facing the road and got it ready for the next big project: replacing all the large windows and rebuilding that wall – which is not stone, but wood construction, so we should be able to do it.
Really had fun knitting more hats – (should not have bought a hat knitting pattern book), but worked on the weaving as well, since it still gets dark pretty early in the evenings.
