This week... Well, this week we had snow several times. Not a lot at once, and it melted within 24 hours each times. But, I am ready to be done with snow for the season. The moisture is appreciated, but can't we have rain instead? On Friday morning, we made a lot of progress on the front yard flagstone steps. We planned to finish the front steps this morning, but woke to... SNOW, and had to postpone.

This week in the garden, I saw the first sure signs of spring. Several different types of seedlings are sprouting, some that I planted and some that self-seeded from last year: mizuna, kale, garlic, strawberry spinach, walking Egyptian onion, bulb onions, and one of my favorite dual-purpose ornamental edibles, magenta orach. It is a magnificently beautiful magenta color, even from sprout. The flavor is similar to spinach, but the outer part of the leaf has a velvety texture. By mid-summer, orach shoots up to an incredible height of 5-6 feet tall before setting a large tuft of round papery seed pods that age from magenta to crisp tan.

In my efforts to "reduce, reuse, recycle" and "go green", I decided to close the cycle on a couple of processes in my garden. First, the ducks require high amounts of calcium and other minerals to create those fabulous egg shells each day. But, those lovely egg shells come already loaded with the perfect combination of vitamins and minerals in them. So, why not dry, crush (and bake them to kill any microorganisms) and feed them back to the ducks for the next round? Instead of throwing the shells away, or composting them, I'm simply feeding them back through the cycle to become a shell anew.