Rob started many seeds in the greenhouse this week. He focused on flowers, tomatoes and peppers to start with, and will be adding more kinds of vegetables before long. I just realized I forgot to tell him the onion seeds need to go in soon….they take a long time, as well. Last year, he had great success with some of these plants that take a little longer to reach transplant size by re-potting them into little cartons one or even two times as they outgrew their small cells. Patsy wrote out a lot of tags for him so he can hopefully avoid mixing things up this year. He was a little frustrated by a few rogue plants last year!

He’s got some pansies and cilantro up. He’s also got some fine-leaved plant in the midst of the cilantro that isn’t cilantro. Since they are his own saved seeds, he figures they might be poppy seeds that fell to the bottom of the bag. We’ll know before long. The encouraging news is that some of his saved seeds are sprouting!

He decided to try to root some Daphne. I hope it does root. I’ve always had a bush wherever I’ve lived and there isn’t one here, yet.

He picked another large container full of his winter lettuce. It has, however, been moved out of the greenhouse to allow for the new seedlings, so we will see if this cold spell they say is coming does it in, or if it is truly hardy.

I accomplished a huge project this past week. I used every spare moment for several days unloading, sorting, and re-loading the camper’s food supply. I always keep a full pantry out there, as we cook constantly while we camp. There were cans, home-filled jars and boxes of things under the bench seats that haven’t been needed for quite some time. In fact, some of those cans had been there since we lived in the camper a few summers ago. They were there as extras in case I ran out of something. I was ruthless and rotated every single item out with things canned this past summer, or with dates of later in 2021 or higher. I brought the older food in and we followed the “clean the camper menu plan” all week. Almost all the food was still good, expect for some things like crackers that had been overlooked. I had been through the cupboards that we use more frequently last fall, but still rotated the items out for longer-dated items. There is still plenty of food out there, but I pared it down quite a bit. We don’t need as much as we used to, as we are feeding less people when we do go camping.

For many reasons, we did not camp much last summer, and we hope to make up for it this summer. Our camper had a huge issue a few weeks back and began to leak badly, but now it’s fixed, and home, and filled with good food to eat, so things are looking hopeful. The night they extended the ability to make camping reservations 6 months ahead, Rob got up at midnight and made a bunch of them.

Now Rob can make plans to do some more wonderful Dutch oven cooking for us.

Of course, a certain little boy is begging to go with us. He’d love to do some fishing like he did last year. Patsy is excited, as well. This picture is at Coffenbury Lake, at Ft. Stevens State Park. We’d love to go there again, but late summer, so we need for the reservations to open up for that time slot. We’ll see what happens. In the meanwhile, we have some places closer to home to camp at over the next few months. It takes less gas, especially for shorter camping trips, to choose spots closer to home, and we have more time to enjoy our camping since it takes less time to drive there. We plan to drag Michaela along at least once. She’s been hesitant, as new situations are difficult for her, but I believe she will enjoy it once she tries it.

Rob and I had our second Covid shot. Contrary to what others have experienced, we did not suffer any adverse side effects, other than I had a slightly sore arm for one day. Rob didn’t even feel it. Of course, he does have a whole row of healing stitches in his elbow…..just went through 2 surgeries….used to suffer terribly with hip pain….just sayin’. The man knows what real pain is! But, he did not get chills, a fever, flu-like symptoms or any of that, either, and neither did I. We were told it took 1 week to become fully effective. We are giving it a little more time since there is so much conflicting information out there…wearing masks, social distancing, etc., regardless, but do look forward to attending church and visiting some friends for the first time in a year, before too much more time passes. I’m excited!!