What a busy Memorial Day Weekend!

On Saturday I visited a friend for a look inside his new beehive. We’d taken an into to beekeeping class together this spring, and he won the class drawing for a complete hive with bees. After taking the class I decided against adding bees to the farm this spring, figuring that the roughly $600 outlay to get started with two hives was too much at this time. Further, there are so many things that can go wrong with a bee colony, from diseases to pests to the vagaries of weather and wildlife, that I got nervous I would screw it up and didn’t want to add that stress right now.

However, after seeing Aaron’s beehive, I am totally smitten and kicking myself that, as usual, I over thought it and didn’t jump right in. With complete sincerity I have to say that opening that hive and seeing thousands of beautiful creatures busy creating their perfect home was one of the most miraculous things I have ever seen. The precision of each cell of honeycomb blows my mind, as does the order the bees demonstrate as they go about separating comb into areas to raise brood and store honey.

We added a super (outside box), fed the bees, and inspected each frame of the hive. I learned how to hold a bee-covered frame without dropping it or crushing any bees. We found the queen, distinguished by a red dot of paint on her back, busy in the lowest super. Through this whole experience the bees buzzed about around me and I didn’t feel scared once. I was wearing overalls, my wellies, and a borrowed bee jacket and veil, along with rubber kitchen gloves. I think this delicate armor helped to alleviate any fear of being stung, but I also felt entirely calm around the bees. An inner voice told me that calmer I was, the calmer the bees would be (which is a mindfulness technique I have learned from working with all sorts of animals), and it seemed to work. I just focused on assisting Aaron and my mind was entirely present. It was strangely meditative, actually, moving slowly and deliberately so as not to kill the bees or panic them.

If anything, I’d get a beehive just to feel that peacefulness again. But I have been doing this farm thing long enough to know that the flip side of that wonderful feeling is the sadness that comes when living things in my care get sick, or injured, or fail to thrive.

I spent Sunday working in the garden, planting out a bunch of plants that Aaron sent home with me. I also fabricated more than twenty dahlia supports from 42″ tomato cages. I cut the legs off each cage, bent those wires into u-pins, and brought them to the garden, where I secured them, upside-down for stability, over the more than twenty dahlias that I planted out. I had started these dahlias in pots, some as early as March and others in April, hoping to get earlier blooms than usual. We’ll see if it works. Regardless, I will have very neatly supported plants!

I’ve also been busy tucking zinnia seeds around the house garden, and minding the blossoming veg garden. Lots going on—the growing season is upon us and I can be outside from morning until sunset and not run out of things that need tending.

Then on Memorial Day I went to a cookout hosted by new master gardener friends. When I got home, around 8:30 p.m., I bottled the beer that I made when my friends Brad (my homebrew mentor) and Amy visited in early May.

It’s a kölsch, a nice summer sipper, and I am pretty excited about it. I was nervous as the top blew off the fermenter its first day out, but that didn’t seem to negatively affect the beer.

As the kitchen was already a mess, I went ahead and bottled up some of my kombucha. This is the first batch I have made in four years, and it’s delicious. I spiked a few bottles with ginger, cherries and strawberries for a secondary fermentation. And then at nearly midnight I started soaking some wheatgrass seeds, which is a new experiment. I plan to grow them out to add to my green juices.

And so things continue on: growing or not growing, fermenting, decomposing or dying.  It’s all happening here, all around me.

Tuesday morning it rained harder than I’ve heard it rain in a long time. By midday, though, the skies were clear. So I headed out to walk up a mountain at Mint Springs Valley Park. I figured I owed Tucker an outing as he’d been inside all day Monday while I attended my master gardener class.

The rain was still pouring down the mountain, turning the trails into creeks. It made for beautiful but very muddy hiking. I have many times swum in the lake at Mint Springs, which has a nice sandy beach and is ringed by mountain ranges. But this was my first time on the trails at the park.

There were a couple of old homestead chimneys along the path.

And the lime green evidence of spring just starting to appear.

I was hiking along the ridgetop and was clobbered by a fragrance memory as I entered a grove of pines. For a minute I was zapped more than a decade back to college and hiking in the pine forests of Mount Lemmon near Tucson, Arizona.

Looking southwest over Greenwood toward Nelson County.

First tick of the season, crawling in the waistband of my jeans. It hadn’t bitten me yet, but definitely signaled the insect misery of the summer to come.

Super happy flying trail dog

The upper lake at the end of the hike. In all we did a few miles up, and then down, the Little Yellow Mountain. The trails aren’t extensive at Mint Springs, but they travel through a nice variety of topography and best of all, I was the only person on them.

As I was leaving the park I saw this blazing barn in an old apple orchard. I ditched the car, jumped out,

scrambled across a creek on this handy fallen tree,

and got a few photos right before the sun ducked behind the mountain and the whole scene went dead.

of the season. Up before sunrise yesterday for a very cold walk. It was six degrees here at 6:30 a.m. the previous morning. Winter has finally arrived, and I am straying from the wood stove only to fill the bird feeders and defrost the chicken water.

The neatest thing was seeing all the fox tracks in the snow. I haven’t seen a fox in ages and thought they’d ceded the yard to Tucker in their canine turf war. However, they left tons of evidence that they are very much still in residence. Here’s where they went under the chicken coop.

And poked around the clean out door, no doubt sniffing the delicious dinner sleepily roosting just out of reach.

And failing to gain entry, they hopped into the little run behind the coop to try their luck with that side!

But I have the nicest, tightest coop in the East, thanks to my dad and a heatwave construction blitz, so the fox had to look elsewhere for its meal.

It’s eighteen degrees and snowing again now, and looking downright wintery outside. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago Tucker and I were enjoying 72-degree days and the sunrise at the beach!

Here’s to more adventures on the road and on the farm.

Last weekend’s unseasonably warm temperatures (almost 70 degrees!) begged for an adventure. I found one in a canoe picnic on the Beaver Creek reservoir near Crozet, Va.

I hadn’t been on the water since kayaking two summers ago. It was wonderful to spend hours poking about, exploring the shoreline. Only a few fishermen were on the water, so it felt like having a private lake.

I enjoyed seeing all the beaver-gnawed trees at the water’s edge, but I didn’t find their dam. The best discovery of the day was a bale of turtles in shallow water at the far end of the reservoir. And we also found scads of huge mussel shells in one area. They were big—the size of the mussels you usually eat in restaurants. I have yet to determine if the mussels live in the lake or if someone dumped their dinner shells…unlikely as the reservoir is surrounded by cow pasture.

Watching the mountains change from blue to gold from the middle of the water was lovely treat. And a fantastic Timbercreek Organics beef hamburger at the always-entertaining Fardowner’s in Crozet capped off a wonderful day!

In the morning, I headed to the private beach near my cottage to give Tucker his first glimpse of the sea. As he does with most any body of water, he waded right in, regarding the small waves with first puzzlement and then delight. The seagulls bobbing further from the shore were most attractive, and if I hadn’t called him back I am sure he would have been on his way to Nova Scotia.

This beach was made up of very sharp, very slippery rocks, which were in turn covered by razory barnacles. I worried about Tuck ripping up his feet or me twisting an ankle—neither ideal ways to begin a couple of days of hiking—so I cut our time on this stretch short and headed in to Acadia National Park.

I briefly stopped at the visitors’ center to pay my $10 admission and chat up the rangers about a good hike. Some of the Acadia hikes involve iron ladders over granite cliffs, and though Tucker’s scrambling skills are improving, his lack of opposable thumbs might make those routes challenging. We settled on a nice, easy starter hike: Gorham Mountain to Sand Beach.

Tuck was so thrilled to be off leash in the wilderness that he was literally flying along the trail, racing ahead then back to check on me and then back out ahead. For every mile I did, he did at least three. The trail started with a nice granite path—which I would soon learn was a signature of Acadia’s trails.The way was marked with blue blazes and rock cairns.

Sand Beach, our destination, in the distance:

We encountered perhaps ten groups of hikers on this trail. We were the only solo woman/dog pairing, and I was asked to snap countless portraits of happy trail companions. I must have looked approachable, or interruptable. Alas, no one offered to take my picture, or my dog’s, which I find sociologically very interesting. Does one need to be traveling with another human to warrant the making of a photographic memory? Or any memory at all?

I knew the minute I stepped on this trail that I was in for a treat. The combination of blue ocean, pink granite, inky green evergreens, white birch, golden beech, late fall colors and blue sky added up to my dream hiking combination. Every sense was full to its max and I was loving it. I’ve never hiked through deciduous forest with a sea view, so my paradigm was shifting with every step.

Truly one of the most enjoyable walks of my life.

We made our way down to Sand Beach, where Tucker graduated to slightly larger waves. He’d run after and chase them as they broke, take a tumble as he was rolled in the surf and then right himself, shake off, and look around, confused and a bit crestfallen that his toy had disintegrated beneath his feet. Thank goodness there’s always the next set headed toward the shore. I truly believe he could play in the ocean all day. It’s the happiest I have ever seen him.

The ridge in the photo above is what we just hiked: Gorham Mountain.

Up next, our adventures in Acadia continue with an oceanfront evening hike.

When last I wrote of my New England adventure, I had just left Gorham, New Hampshire and was headed toward Maine. I was fascinated and impressed by a style of architecture I saw almost everywhere: farmhouses connected to various outbuildings connected to gigantic barns.

It is so wonderfully sensible, in such a cold climate, to be able to do most of your chores and tend your animals without having to go outside. I loved the looks of these frankenhomesteads and how they grew as the need arose.

I was still traveling along Route 2, and it wasn’t long past the Maine state line that I came upon an antique store housed in one of these architectural wonders.

Route 2 is lined with “antique” stores—most of them selling junk out of mouldering houses—but Steam Mill Antiques in Bethel had a wonderful upstairs room filled with old books on all sorts of subjects that interest me. I picked up a trio of Euell Gibbons’ 1960s forager/naturalist cooking classics, including Stalking the Wild Asparagus, as well as an original copy of We Took to the Woods, Louise Dickinson Rich’s autobiography of going back to the land in Maine. All books that have been parked on my Amazon wishlist for years—how nice to find them in their natural habitat!

It didn’t seem like too much longer until I was in Bangor, Maine, which I detoured to visit on my way to Bar Harbor. Bangor is a place I’ve always wanted to see, and it totally didn’t match my expectation. I suppose that’s because I’ve always envisioned it grey-skied and covered with feet of snow. On this nice fall day, it looked much like any other New England town, with a small downtown of old buildings. I didn’t see  much that caught my eye from the car, so I headed east again toward the ocean.

And there it is, my first glimpse of the sea. Right next to the landmark Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound which was, sadly, closed for the season.

The sun had set when I pulled in to Hanscom’s Motel and Cottages a few miles north of Bar Harbor. I had taken a darling freestanding cottage for the evening, with a full kitchen and nice, fast internet. Just the perfect size for a girl and her dog!

It was wonderful to pick up a few groceries and be able to cook a bit after eating out for so long. It was also nice and quiet, and I settled in to rest up for the next day, in which Tucker met the ocean for the first time in his life and we hiked Acadia National Park!

I interrupt my New England travelogue to let those of you who have inquired know that I am home, having driven from Connecticut yesterday. I would have enjoyed a few more days in Maine, but I didn’t think that the coast would be terribly pleasant if Hurricane Sandy turns out to be what’s forecast. I wanted to get off the road before the storm hit, and I needed to be home to batten down the hatches.

It’s been a busy day of preparing for high winds, which cause damage themselves but will most likely knock the power out. I have swapped out the screens in the chicken coop for glass panes, and I brought all my porch furniture and containers of plants inside. Any loose stuff around the yard is now under roof—and I have to say I like this tidy look! I harvested about a million dahlias and zinnias from the garden, knowing they would be beaten to shreds in the wind and their heavy flower heads would most likely damage the plants as they swung. I picked peas, beans, peppers, chard, mustard, herbs, and five pounds of persimmons. I am not sure the persimmons are quite ready, but they were so heavy on the branches of a young tree that I considered them a liability. Better to have sour persimmons this year than no persimmon tree next.

Inside I did all my trip laundry in anticipation of an almost-guaranteed power outage, charged lanterns, located flashlights and filled a bathtub with water to use for toilet flushing. I also drew buckets of water for the chickens and stored them in the garage. All preparations fresh in my mind from a week without power after the June 29 derecho. At least this time around its not 110 degrees outside!

And then I went into town to gas up the car and get a few groceries before returning home to mow the grass. It hadn’t been mowed since before my trip, and I know it’s much easier to pick up leaves and the inevitable downed tree branches from short grass.

Now it’s just after five and the wind has definitely picked up. If I can just get some of my postroadtrip mess put away inside, the better to avoid tripping while navigating by flashlight, I will consider myself in good shape for the coming storm.

And don’t worry—there is still much to come on the story of my trip, including my favorite part—just as soon as Sandy passes! Thanks to all who checked in on me, and if you are in this storm’s path, let’s hope for the best.

I left Hill Farmstead in the late afternoon via Routes 15 and 2. I stopped for gas around sunset in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and started calling around for a place to stay, searching for pet friendly hotels on my iPhone. This technique had worked pretty well all trip, but in St. Johnsbury I had my first challenge finding a dog-friendly room for the night. But after about 45 minutes of searching and a few calls, I lucked on to the Top Notch Inn, in Gorham, New Hampshire, where Hannah sweetly answered my call.

I set off along Route 2, and one of my regrets of this trip is I hadn’t left enough daylight for this very scenic drive through the White Mountains—the queue at Hill Farmstead and the phone marathon in St. Johnsbury had killed my sunlit hours. Even in the fading light I could tell I was surrounded by spectacular scenery, but this was about the extent of my view: the New Hampshire state line sign. At least I bagged another state!

I pulled in to Gorham grateful to have not hit a moose. I received a warm welcome at Top Notch and after feeding Tucker his dinner, I headed out for mine. The Saalt Pub looked promising, so I swung open their door and took a seat next to a few other couples at the bar.

Immediately owner Steve Jackson, above in the checkered shirt, made me feel at home as he poured a pint of the local brown ale on tap, from Moat Mountain in North Conway, New Hampshire. As I drank I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me, the beautiful Jan, who was eating dinner with her husband David. We talked all through dinner, and Jan—a local who’d lived many places and returned home to Gorham—made me feel welcome. When I told her of my trip, she said, “Wow, you’re really brave.”

This struck me, and it’s been a concept I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since as I’ve journeyed as a single woman with her dog. Never once in coming on this trip has bravery entered my equation, and I’ve entered dodgy Route 81 rest stops with pepper spray in hand, walked in to myriad dark hotel rooms, driven more than a thousand miles in a car that theoretically could have a problem at any time, and hiked by myself to the top of granite mountains where with one misstep I would plummet to the ocean below.

And yet I don’t consider any of these things to be brave. They are just me, living my life. I decided a long time ago that I would rather seek experience than be afraid, and I have made peace with the idea that my number could be up at any moment. I do what I can to be smart, aware, and safe, but beyond that a certain kind of fatalism takes over and I find that awfully freeing.

But back to the trip at hand, where David has just set my dinner before me. A plate of sausage, roasted red peppers and onions, pesto, tapenade, goat cheese and bread—with one beautifully fried lacinato kale leaf. It ended up being my favorite meal of the trip—a combination of all my favorite things done perfectly by David’s wife, the chef Liz Jackson.

Between bites I chatted with Jan and I gave her a few pointers about how to use her new iPhone. After a second beer, I rolled back to the Top Notch feeling nourished and happy. Everyone I’d met in Gorham seemed like good people, and I’d enjoyed wonderful food and drink prepared with attention and care. Not too bad for a last-minute gas station google search. That’s road trip serendipity.

In the morning I checked out of the hotel, but not before Tucker got in a few good barks at the lawn decor, which proved to be pretty much a conglomeration of his nightmares. All through this trip Tucker, when in the car, has barked at big outdoor sculptures and scarecrows. With six days until Halloween, and by passing through the land of moose monuments and chainsaw art, this has meant a pretty predictable stream of commentary from the back seat. It’s interesting to me that the exact same items don’t seem to bother Tuck when he’s outside of the car—we walked right around this moose and scarecrow duo with no fuss—but in the car it’s so predictable that I brace for it.

I grabbed a sandwich and large tea for the road from the White Mountain Cafe and Bookstore, and then hit the highway to finally check off a big prize on my quest to visit all 50 states: Maine!