We have so many plants! E brought up our Skagit Conservation District order yesterday and this morning, as soon as I post this email, we're biking out to pick up our Whatcom CD order and then we'll be planting and planting and planting our tiny, bareroot natives into hedgerows. I want to jump forward five years, just to catch a glimpse of the hedges filling in and full of birdsong, but being short a time machine I'll have to settle for watching them grow the slow way.

If you missed it on the bakery's social media, I have an interviewed in last week's Rise Up! podcast about the Raven Bakery past, present, and future. You can listen to it from the link above or through your podcast app of choice.

And finally, the Spring Bread Subscription is up and will be 10% off through April 2nd (which also happens to be our first Saturday farmers market of the year!). Pickups every Wednesday in the neighborhoods, as usual. You know the drill, or if you don't you can read about it here.

Happy Sunday. I hope you, too, have a day full of spring promise.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I've learned this week that pigs make literal pig piles. When not rooting through the grass or galloping in circles, the pigs we've borrowed from E are most often snuggled up side by side or one on top of the other for a nap.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

We have so many backyard schemes to plant this first winter and spring in the new house: a kitchen garden, a fruit and nut orchard, a native wetland meadow and hedge along the flooding drainage ditch at the bottom of the garden. Big dreams to fill the bakery’s slow season. But before planting there are noxious weeds to dig out (again), fruit trees to take down and buck up (why did someone 1. plant trees with mild and uninspiring fruit along 2. the entire south property line and 3. pollard them once and then never prune them again?), old privacy fences (patched and propped and patched again) to mend or burn, drainage ditches to dig, a deer fence to build. I spent yesterday afternoon mucking through the future orchard, thinking about fruit trees and digging in drainage. The ground squished. The mud clumped on the soles and sides of my boots. The sod was heavy, the clay underneath even heavier. Worried I’d snap the shovel’s loose handle, I lifted the wedges of wet earth out with my hands. My gloves soaked through, and my cracked old boots. By the time E showed up with a chainsaw and began cutting trunk-sized water spouts off a cherry tree it was getting dark and the first ditch was nearly done. It was all great fun: the mud, the hard, wet work, the flicker of slash fires, and the crack of falling limbs. More akin to building waterworks from rock, sand, and kelp tubes—a favorite game on family backpacking trips to the coast when I was young—than to grownup labor. This morning I found the first ditch filling but not yet flowing. I itched to grab a shovel and correct the grade but, still in pajamas and with a half finished mug of coffee in hand, resisted. Tomorrow I’ll answer your emails (sorry!), pay quarterly taxes, research equipment. Today I’m putting on yesterdays clothes (hopefully dry) and going back out to play in the mud.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

After the mad rush of the holiday markets, I shut down the bakery every year for a break. This year the first two weeks were consumed by holiday gatherings and house projects. I thought of bread no further than finishing up the bakery’s bookkeeping and throwing together a few casual loaves to fuel our work. By the third week, away from the house and its demands, my days opened. I began to walk, run, ski for hours. My mind woke up, filling the space now empty of work and chores. Often I was so full of jostling thoughts I barely registered the landscape around me. I’d come in from the cold with ideas fully formed and go straight to my notebook or computer to record them, spending the short afternoons and late into the nights absorbed in putting some new scheme to paper. I made a lot of rudimentary but very satisfying diagrams, floor plans, and maps.

Approaching my last week of break I find my mind finally quieting, the backlog of creativity released. Instead of grabbing my laptop and disappearing into its depths until my eyes are scratchy with sleep, I might now come in from a walk and meander to the kitchen to check the sourdough and put on a pot of tea. I might pick up the newspaper. I might feel the sudden itch to bake. I’ve been feeling a lot of baking itches. Pretty soon I’m going to run out of people to eat them all. By the time I return to Bellingham in a week to start up the Winter Bread Subscription, I’ll be more than ready to get back into the bakery, which makes this a winter break well spent.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

When the snow came our lives turned inward. Even if I’d trusted the car drivers, the unploughed roads were too rough for my bicycle. The sidewalks were mostly un-shovelled and slow going. We were stuck. Clearing out the common rooms in our house felt like unraveling the homemaking of the past months. We stacked chairs, couch, chest, table together, emptied the bookshelf and cabinets and unscrewed them from the walls. The plants now crowded the dark, upstairs hallway. Books piled up under my bed and marched up the stair treads. Rolled carpets and table leaves leaned together in a closet.

The work was long and often tedious. Drywall, mudding, mudding, mudding, cutting trim to fit the crooked walls, blocking up the odd gaps, caulking and caulking and painting and painting. Every morning I pulled on the same faded black t-shirt with holes in the armpits, the same canvas pants with a utility knife and pencil in the side pocket. I lost track of the days.

Today is the first of the new year. The house is still in chaos but a dank, cold wind no longer blows up through the gaps in the walls. There’s color now where there was once only contractor gray and peeling wallpaper. This isn't the decisive new beginning that a house restored to order would be but the yellow walls are a good start.

Sophie
Owner | Baker