Fads may come and go but butternuts are forever

Hello, gentle readers!  I expect you are all, as I am, in the throes of holiday preparation.  I have a few moments while Maegwin is getting a bath from Daddy to try and jot some things down.  Last week I was cleaning out the basement and discovered some butternut squash from over a year ago.


We brought them upstairs and photographed their fabulous condition. These are from the fall of 2011! The proof, as they say, is in the pudding so we cut it open and roasted it.
Conclusion: Delicious! I was putting the innards in the compost when it struck me that those seeds were exactly the kind of thing we should be saving. A butternut that stores well for over a year? Crazy! I fished them back out and we plan to plant some this coming season. We got our seeds and seed potatoes already. We are going to grow blue potatoes along with our standard reds. We spent a lot of time selecting items with Maegwin since I think this is the first year she's going to be really involved with the garden. Our intention was to make sure our harvests would produce veggies that get her excited so we have white, purple, and red carrots, purple broccoli, dragon tongue beans (like green beans with red stripes), and several colors of radishes to name a few. We are very excited! We also fished some of the old windows from down in the basement and will be building some cold frames later today so that we can plant some lettuce, cabbage, and spinach. Sadly we don't need them yet since 2012 is the hottest year on record and we've been 10-15 degrees above normal. It doesn't bode well for the summer so we're going to try to get as much as we can out of the garden while it's tolerable to work outside.

 We had some guests for Thanksgiving so in preparation it gave us the kick in the pants to get Maegwin's room done. We did several primer coats to cover up the hideous orange and then a lovely shade of light pink that Maegwin chose.
So from this:
 
To this:
 
She really loves it and the room is so much brighter! The last thing to do is owl stencil and I want to make some roman shades for the window.
Josh's family were all out visiting and sadly I got no pictures!  We had a great time though playing Settlers of Catan, hanging out, and putting up our tree.  I did catch this photo which I love.  It looks like Josh is the Flash and Maegwin is ordering him to zoom around.  Grandpa Kevin is observing it all.



Catch up post on knitting to follow!  My needles have been quite busy.