"Weather permitting" is our springtime motto!

We just bottled the Irish Red. By bottling time, a 5 gallon recipe yields just over 4 gallons. But it tastes great so far. Now we wait 4 weeks to let it carbonate. We also moved the pale ale to a secondary carboy. It's modelled after Sierra Nevada pale ale and has a great hoppy bite to it. Should be a refreshing summer beer.

Here's Mark, doing the wave. Amazingly enough, there are no bite wounds on his human 'perch'!.


The usual Seven Trees dogpile, with Stew performing a double-twist with drool manuever. Such talent!

Here are a couple of beers we taste-tested recently. One is German and the other Czech. The German beer had a person riding a bull or cow on the label, so we knew it would be good - fruity, lighter than our usual fare, but nice. The other beer, a Baltika lager, was bold with a lot of body and residual sweetness. It packed a wallop with 8% alcohol. Baltika makes a number of beers, number being the key word - each one has a big number on the label. As you can see, we tried Lager #9. Another interesting taste, but neither one is a replacement for our favorites.

In the garden so far - the experiment with starting seeds in coir pots and tenting them with clear plastic in the greenhouse hasn't yielded much yet. Tomatoes and peppers should be just germinating, but maybe the colder weather has slowed them down. I planted another round today, in potting soil in 6" pots for insurance. The main garden in coming along. We've got carrots, lettuce and beets in the ground so far, and spinach, onions, kale & chard will go in as we get the soil worked. The weather has been so mixed, it's hard to decide when to work up the seed beds. We're succession planting, so in a week or so, I'll plant more of everything. Hopefully we'll have a longer harvest season this way. The seed potatoes and asparagus crowns arrive this month, so there's more garden space that needs working ASAP. Good workouts though...