Plenty of planting today in the strong belief Spring will really be arriving eventually.

I am growing nine kinds of tomatoes.  Nearly all are heirloom.  One variety is supposed to taste like raw lemons…  Another is named nearly the same as our street (Nineveh vs Ninevah, both variants of the same word).  For cherry this year, I am trying a black cherry tomato variety.

I like yellow tomatoes, so am trying some of them in a very old variety.  I liked the name Bread and Salt for one old Russian variety, and a Thick Skinned Green variety is supposed to be very good for winter storage.

We are not big cabbage eaters, but I am trying a French heirloom.  And for cauliflower, an Italian purple heirloom.  And for the first time ever, I am trying gooseberries and tomatillos.

I am trying all of my garden from seed this year–other than garlic, shallots, onions, potatoes, and most berries–so I have a lot to start indoors.  Today I also planted all of the herbs that need some indoor time, such as sage, basil, tarragon, oregano and chives.  I also started some echinacea, bee balm, and heirloom yellow strawberries.

The squash and Roma tomatoes I started several weeks ago are doing very well.  No sign yet of any eggplant sprouting, but nearly all of my peppers and even the celery is growing well.

Some warm, sunny days will really help.  The plants, and me.

Stout was staring something down earlier today out of the opened interior barn door in the kitchen.  I looked out and there was a handsome ring-necked pheasant about 40 feet away!  Quite a sight!

Once Chris, Sammy, and Tasha rushed to the door, he got nervous and skittled off Road Runner-style.

Winter weather be damned.

Chris and I built our chicken and duck brooder tonight.

We used found materials out in the outbuilding.

The chicks are due to arrive in a week.  The ducklings soon after.

Some prior owner of this place had chickens; I found the brooder lamp out in the outbuilding along with a waterer.

So, pretty soon, we’ll have nine little feathered friends hanging out in the laundry room for a few weeks.

Hey, snow–WHATEVER!

Despite the continuing cold and long term forecasts that show the low temperatures remaining way too low for this time of year, I am planting seeds indoors to get ready for mid-May transplanting.

This year I am experimenting with peppers like Thai, cayenne, and ghost chilis.

Bell peppers are something we eat a lot of, so plenty of those going in, and why not chocolate habaneros?  I’ve not tried celery from seed, or even from a plant before, so that will be interesting.  It is a true marvel  of nature that a seed that tiny can make such a substantial plant.

And lastly for this past weekend, two varieties of eggplant, one Ukrainian and one Italian.  Maybe I will even get Chris to like eggplant in some form or another this year!

Ah, Stouty and Sammy, they make quite the pair, these two.  They are innocent posers for sure.  Yes, we also have Tasha, but T-dog goes her own way most of the time.  The two boys, they work as a team.

Yesterday out on our field hike, Sammy was on a roll.  First, he woke up a field mouse in the deep leaves.  In true cartoon-like fashion, the mouse popped up on its hind legs and chirruped at Sammy, who bobbed his head up and down above the little grey guy.  Instinct-wise, he likely wanted to chomp that little guy, but Sammy is a bit of a Buddhist and thinks a lot, truly, so he left the mouse alone and moved on.

Meanwhile Stout was busy racing through the woods looking for another dead squirrel.  See, he found one the other day–unfortunately for Chris it was on a hike that she joined–and he could not have been prouder.  The regal retriever in him did not want to drop that saggy squirrel the first time I told him to, or the next eight times either.  Hopefully some other critter in the night took care of that soggy squirrel sack of bones.

Anyway, as Stout raced in the big woods, Sammy and I, with T-dog trailing somewhere behind, walked along the thicket in our pasture.  Suddenly Sammy was excited and I then spied the ring neck pheasant rooster he found.  The prancing bird and Sammy did the classic fast forward chase around the little trees–some Benny Hill music would have been appropriate.  Soon, Stout showed up and the pace got really fast, but that pheasant had no interest in doing anything other than scampering.  That was until Stout turned on the jets and started his eight foot leaps–then the bird used flight to escape to the feathery grasses by the barn foundation.  He caught his breath for a couple of minutes until Stout found him again and then he squawked and flew into the woods across the street, having had enough of dog business.

And Friday, in a more domestic moment in dogdom, Stout pulled off something that we are not quite sure what to make of.  Chris will sometimes close the door in the kitchen that leads to the hallway that goes back to her studio.  I guess she finds dog slobber on her leg and the “hey, watcha doin’ now” stare with the constant following to be distracting from things like etching and routing and maintaining her sanity.

Anyway, the dogs usually eat about 4:30p or so.  At about 4:40p, Stout slowly slinked his way into her studio and was like, “hey, uh, just checking to see if, uh, you might want to make us dinner.”  (He is, indeed, all teenage boy.)  So, somehow, he opened the door in the kitchen without an opposable thumb.  If the door had not been closed all the way, he would have been down there bugging her hours before.  So, yeah. We’ll see where this little saga goes…

Saying that one is living in any sort of area known as Wine Country has the potential to sound pompous and uppity, and perhaps it does.  But living in wine country is marvelous.  Actually, the fact that Ohio has a Wine Country, or really, more than one, is pretty damned sweet.

And sweet is indeed the order of the day with ice wines, one of the true gifts to the world from Ohio’s northeast portion of its wine country.  Country that Chris and I just happen to live in the heart of.

The past two Saturdays, and next Saturday too, is the annual Ice Wine Fest, where a half-dozen Grand River Valley Wineries offer up their latest silky sweet ice wines in an official and organized tour.  Fortunately, several other wineries not officially part of the tour also participate, and at least as fortunate is the participation of a distillery.  More on that later.

Each winery offers two samples of wine, at least one of them ice wine, and a food pairing.  The three samples are $6 in total, and if you donate a canned good, you get $1 off.  So, that 29 cent can of butter beans from Aldi that has a blanket of dust on top is actually worth a buck–good investment.

Chris and I split the samples since we were A) hitting several places each day and B) we needed to drive home safely and C) the food portions are about the size of the free samples the ladies in aprons give you near the baloney at the grocery store.

We enjoyed (mostly) each of the wineries for different reasons, and this Fest has given us a good sense of who among our friends and family we will take where in the future.

Grand River Cellars: we started at this winery last week.  It’s set far off of the highway (528 to be exact) and is quite large.  There’s a sizable restaurant with a wide ranging menu that we will return to try out.  They have a fireplace where you can toast your own $3 marshmallow.  It was crowded–this was the only place that had people directing car parking in the lot.  We were herded down to the cellar to sample the wine.  It was cool being in the cellar in every sense of the word.  Their ice wine was quite good–smooth, pear-y, highly golden in hue.  The food sample was a caramel pear tart and was our favorite of the foods.  A nice place to take visitors who like to shop of souvenirs and eat caesar salads.

St. Joseph Vineyard: The signs to this winery point you further south of 528 from Grand River Cellars, but when you wind past the residence to the small vineyard building there is a small sign that tells you they moved to route 307.  That sign needs to be at the road.  Anyway, we hit this winery on the second day, and its new location feels quite new, maybe too new at this point.  The ice wine was OK, a bit metallic, and the homemade strudel was pretty blah.  Chris got a shard of apple core in hers.  This was the only place where one of the ice wine pourers was questioning in tone and eyebrow about whether I was trying to get more samples than I was due for my $5 bucks.  Parking was also random.  Still, they have a national award winning Pinot Noir that we’ll have to check out sometime when a Pinot fan is visiting.

Debonne Vineyard: Certainly one of the two biggest success stories in the region from a sales and scale perspective.  They segmented the ice wine sampling away from their lively music-filled restaurant, which was a good idea.  As always, the place was packed.  They had sled dogs visiting that one could pet, which I did of course, though I am not a fan of forcing dogs to pull sleds in this day and age.  But, dogs suffer many worse fates every day; they seemed to enjoy the attention.  The ice wine at Debonne was one of our favorites–Chris especially liked the peachy 2013 vintage.  The grainy fudge, Ritz cracker, and dried apricot sample was silly and sad.  Good place to visit with a group who has varied interests and tastes since they have Cellar Rats brewery too.

Laurello Vineyard: This is the only one of the officially participating wineries that we did not stop at.  Both of our passes by were harrowing with the parking lot situation.  Not enough room for the many idiots trying to pull in and out.  And a limo driver standing in the road smoking a cigarette in a snowstorm is a Darwin award waiting to happen.  Still, we’ve been to Laurello before and know that it’s a good place for those who like leather couches and Jimmy Buffet.

Harpersfield Vineyard: We’d heard of Harpersfield from many people who never remember its name.  It’s typically described as the “French place with the dogs and the guy playing guitar.”  It’s well off of highway 307 and is indeed chateau-like.  And there are indeed two small dogs on constant pitter patter patrol, a Jack Russell and a slightly curlier cousin cur.  They were charming and confident, curling up by whomever they chose to near the enormous fireplace (when a man can stand inside of the fireplace to move a log, that counts as enormous in my book).  Anyway, this place did not have ice wine but they do have $1 samples every day from Noon-6p and that’s a happy thing for a swiller like me.  We had a rose, which I enjoyed and Chris found appalling.  Perhaps that’s a slightly strong word, but when one asks “do they store it in metal tanks so it then tastes like the metal tank?” it is clear that it’s not up there with hot cocoa and ginger peach tea.  Anyway, this is a great place for those who love dogs and fireplaces and wine, which is pretty much my entire side of the family.

Ferrante: Along with Debonne, Ferrante is one of the true giants in the Ohio wine industry.  You can buy their wine at Kmart here in Ashtabula, to give you a sense of ubiquity.  The Ferrante compound is immense–limos have their own parking section here.  They had the ice wine tasting in a large enclosed pavilion-like space with these remarkable heaters suspended from the straight-from-the-Amazon-rainforest beams.  They had crafters selling flattened wine bottle cheese trays.  They insisted we go in a certain order from table to table–when I created my own path, I was cattle-prodded back into compliance.  The wine was fine, though the samples were paltry indeed.  The butternut squash soup had marshmallows on top.  Ferrante doesn’t really have to try to please anymore–they are well past the tipping point of failure and likely have all of their processes documented in ISO fashion.  Not my kind of place.

Virant Family Winery: We’d seen the sign for this place many times on South River Road, but this was our fist ever stop in.  The neon OPEN sign and ratio of pickup trucks to BMWs were clear indicators of what was to come; we were not at Ferrante anymore, Toto.  The inside of the winery has a definite wedding reception/bingo hall kind of feel.  There were long folding tables with bottles of A1 sauce spaced every four chairs from one another.  A John Deere towel hung on the wall near the mounted deer head.  This was the only place that served its wine in plastic cups normally reserved for Jello shooters.  On the other hand, this was the only place that served us three samples of wine.  They also had great brownies.  It’s also the only winery we went to where you could also order onion rings and deep fried cheese sticks.  Great place to go with kids in tow and when you had a long day working outside and are still wearing your Coors cap and muddy work boots.

South River Winery: Our longstanding favorite and this Fest did not change that.  Situated in an old church on a hill, with a marvelous pavilion and dreamy outdoor fireplace, South River is a comfort zone for us.  Their blush ice wine is Chris’s favorite, and their elegant ice wine glasses with little stars, made just for the Fest I assume, were our favorites of this year’s collectibles.  The vibe here is always laid back, the people are typically happy and relaxed, and the wine is fabulous.  A place to take anyone you care about.

Red Eagle Distillery: Owned by the same guy who owns South River Winery, and just down the road, this is a fairly new place in a magnificently restored old barn.  We had an old fashioned that was perfectly boozy-sweet.  It had three muddled maraschino cherries at the bottom–three!  It was served in a perfectly heavy glass.  The inside of the place has to be seen–all dark wood and well-positioned ironwork stairways, a sunken bar below the old hay loft–it is a model for what Chris hopes her Studio Barn will feel like when completed.  And hey, not every place can boast an Winnebago-sized brick outhouse.  A great place to take those who love old barns, cocktails, and dark wood.

Life here in Ohio’s wine country, even in this seemingness endless winter, is a sweet gift indeed.

First seeds of the season planted: butternut squash (seeds saved from last year), multicolor bell peppers, and Roma tomatoes.  Just a hint of the trays I’ll be planting this year.