Last night we picked nettles by the barn, volunteer arugula along the driveway, and the few purple sprouting broccoli that survived the winter’s hard freeze and added them too the pan with a fat, winter leek. Dinner was shockingly green after so many months of brown. There’s a jar of daffodils and hyacinths on the table next to me. The buds on the little pear tree out back are full to bursting. Every night now I fall asleep to frog song and wake to birds.

The weekly Saturday market starts up next weekend and the Spring Bread Subscription the Wednesday after. I’m still plugging away at my retail bakery plans. While I wait for contractor estimates I’ve been working on the floor plans and financing. The former is coming along nicely; the latter is nail biting (so much debt!) but I’m starting to wrap my head around it.

And so, with the days lengthening and filling with work and projects and new growth, I’m settling into spring. I hope your days, too, are blooming.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

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

Lots of balls in the air right now planning a production and retail bakery, and so many phone calls: landlord, architect, contractors, city planning, equipment distributors, bank, health department, and then planning again, architect, distributors, accountant, and so on. Every one of those people controls some part of the process, but ultimately it comes down to me and my bakery design. And so when I’m not on the phone, or baking your bread, or hanging out with our borrowed backyard pigs (see below), I move little boxes around on my computer screen, doodle floor plans in my bakery notebook, walk through the imagined space in my head, trying to find the perfect layout. I’m not sure perfection exists, but I am sure that somewhere between efficiency and frugality is a compromise I can live with, if only I can find it.

If you have experience with workspace layout, business financing, or project management that you'd like to share, I'm all ears.

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

It’s overcast now, but for a few minutes this morning the bay was sunlit. The water, the cobbles under our feet, the green-gray mass of the islands, the purple martin nestboxes—empty still—all sharply defined. We stood looking out over the bright water till the clouds closed in and the sun sparkle disappeared, then turned away and climbed back up the bluff, walking home through ordinary winter-soft light.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Riding the straight shoulder of Chuckanut after dark, cars screaming by too bright too loud too fast, ducks rustling up from the flooded fields with my passing, and a barn owl glides towards the road. For a hopeless moment I think she’s going to cross and be struck but she lands at the edge of the ditch and turns her pale, flat face into the glare of my headlight.

We look at each other.

She lifts off as silently as she landed. I ride on towards the farm.

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

East of the mountains, sunshine and hard snow. For days the valley was dark with fog. Skiing along I could see the track in front of me disappearing into gray, the hummocked snow on either side fading out. The trees, the houses, the raven overhead were all shadows in the fog. Now in the sunshine, color. I ditched the ridged ice of the skate platform and double poled down the groomed tracks, looking up and around at the orange ponderosa, the white birch, the red twig dogwood, the electric green lichen dripping from the firs, the brown alder catkins. Textures stood out in sharp focus: the crinkle of dead leaves, the deep grooves in the cottonwood bark, the scarred-over scratch of bear claws down a birch trunk. Below the clear water of the creeks the cobbles were deep yellow, green, brown, their colors undulled by algae. And above the sky: blue and blue and blue.

Tomorrow we return west and I head back into the kitchen. There will be bread next week. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for the Winter Bread Subscription or order single loaves through the online store. This coming Wednesday I’ll be baking Tinned Wheat, Mountain Rye, Cinnamon Raisin (the Wednesday Special), Vollkornbrot, and Seedy Buckwheat. The last two I’ll bake only on the 4th Wednesdays of the month till the market resumes in April.

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 I was a child I built forts. I built forts with curtains and couch pillows, with driftwood, within the branches of my favorite climbing trees. I tunneled into deep snow and nested under bushes. Sometimes the forts were only sketches: this stump is the table; that red cedar the wall; the front door is here, between two stones; those bits of sea glass, smooth beach rocks veined with pink and green, feathers, and drying seed pods lined up along the log are my treasures. Other times the forts were solid, like the one I built in the woods behind my mormor’s house with cedar branches, sheets of moss, and the upended roots of a toppled fir. A few years ago I went walking through those woods and found the lean-to’s remains. Its roof was collapsed and mossy, the stones marking its door unmoved.

Over the years of searching for a bakery space I’ve found many nonstarters—spaces too small, too inaccessible, too contaminated, too expensive—and a few possibilities. For each possibility I sketch out floor plans. As a child I walked and climbed and crawled through my creations. Now I trace my way across the screen from sink to mixer, mixer to table, table to rack, rack to oven. Drawing a floor plan, it turns out, feels a lot like building a fort: you make an abstract representation of a space, whether from rocks and branches or lines on a page, and fill in the details with your imagination.

Sophie
Owner | Baker