First significant patch of light on my garden

[897tgigvib]

From right around November 7th to around February 3rd my garden gets basically no direct sun. Plenty of sky, and the occasional patches filtering through the trees.

It was especially nice to see about half my garden suddenly bathed in sunlight today. Got some leaves blown off the side of the roadway.

And, got to come inside for breaks to visit you all here!

Things like, SeedCorn has troubles with 6 packs of plants when he only wants one or 2 of them.
Hay Seed! Trade them with a friend for lunch at a local burger place!

Poor Smiles got a headache reading about the california rainbow gardeners views on funguses

i think im gonna have to find my reference sources about mendel cuz im prolly gonna get quizzed!

Smiles took the world's cutest picture of a baby chipmunk on a yarrow flower head!

thistle has a merry christmas germinator!

Southern doubled her compost!!!

I think Digit's dog sledding around point barrow STAY WARM UP THERE!!! To build a fire can mean all or nothing!

BobM hasn't said anything lately. I hope the bigfoot kids didn't kidnap him. I really thought they were joking!

I sure miss THE MAMA CHICKEN!



and so much more i just can't think of!!! like, prolly the main thing!

i hear tell they had a ball game today. did someone win?
was there really a gal named Bouncy who sang at half time?

 

[so lucky]

OK, so who won and where are they from? :/ I never could get all this super bowl hoopla. Seems just another way for newscasters to fill in the no-news air time, and walmart to make money selling chicken wings. It totally aggravates me that 60 Minutes is usually Way Behind schedule due to Sunday afternoon football. At my house yesterday, we watched several episodes of Betty White's "Off their Rockers" which is kinda like candid camera but specifically old people spoofing young people. So funny to watch, and Betty White is fearless!

 

[Mickey328]

Sunlight is so HUGE, especially this time of year. Being where we are, we don't have many cloudy, rainy or just overcast days, even in winter, but it's so energizing to see the hours getting longer at this time of year. We're busy working on pre-garden projects...getting the rabbitry built, working on plans for a pergola sort of thing for vines on the deck, planning where all the planting will be. We're putting in quite a few things we've never grown before, so we gotta figure things out...it's exciting, but the planning will pall fairly soon and we'll want to get to the doing phase.

Yeah, I hear there was some big game yesterday...I know the 49'ers were in it because one of my FB friends posted a "go 49'ers" note on their timeline, LOL. I spent the evening going through my seeds to decide what needs to be started inside and when

 

[digitS']

Marshall, I took a little drive today, quite a ways south of Barrow - to Marshall, Washington. I like to take a little loop drive and this very small community is on the route. The only place of "business" in Marshall is the post office (Zip code: 99020) .

I thought of this thread and wanted to stop to get a picture but the light was very poor, I would have had to park in somebody's driveway since snow covered the roadside, and I only had my cellphone. So, I found this picture on the internet. It shows the railroad which is such a prominent feature in this little canyon at the edge of the Palouse Hills.

The community is there behind the higher tracks. Just to the left of what the photo shows is one of the several ponds in the canyon. Fish Lake is straight down the tracks about 2 miles.

The main street is Marshall Avenue.

Here is Smyth Ford on Latah Creek just a few miles away. A bridge now crosses the creek there and leads to California Creek. During the earliest days of white settlement hereabouts, the trail along California Creek was of course called the "California Trail."

Steve
edited to upload a better picture of Smyth Ford

 

[897tgigvib]

The town of
Marshall

has a
Smyth Ford

running off the creek...

and nearby is the
California Trail

Ha!

There is also a town called Marshall near the coast around here
lots of Fords there too
My car is a Ford.

Maybe it was a Ford that forged the
California trail

to connect the two Marshalls

 

[digitS']

You posted just about the moment I uploaded another picture of Smyth Ford. It was an important wayside to camp on the trail to places in the Spokane Valley and on north towards Canada.

If you were going to the big lakes in Idaho or on into Montana back in the Indian and French Canadian fur trader days, this is probably the trail you would have taken.

It should be noted that Lewis & Clark nearly died in the Bitterroot Mountains trying to come the "wrong way." If'n they trekked a little farther north, they could have come all the way down the Clark's Fork River to Pend Oreille Lake on the west side of the Rockies. This was the route the Indians from this part of the world took to hunt buffalo on the east side of the Continental Divide. Lewis & Clark nearly made a fatal mistake by trying a more direct path to the Columbia River.

Steve