Whew! Although I absolutely love traveling, it’s so nice to come home after being away for a while. (Here’s all about our Costa Rica trip if you missed it). What’s even better is to come home to beautiful springtime! When we left over a month ago spring was juuuuust barely starting to show itself, so to see this in our front yard when we pulled into our driveway was exciting!

Poppies! I felt a bit like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. The yarrow has really taken off as well. So glad to have that growing in such abundance right in our front yard!

What we have dubbed as The Biggest Thyme Plant in the World (I’m sure there are much bigger ones out there, but this one is really huge) is also completely covered in flowers and the bees are absolutely loving it.

Also, the raspberry plants (that we didn’t know we had when we moved in) have grown tremendously. We so can not wait to eat the berries and if we’re lucky we’ll get a bumper crop!

The day before we left on our trip we decided to plant a bunch of radish and lettuce seeds, just to see what would happen. We got back to many radishes and a small patch of lettuce. How’s that for a no work garden? Also, check out the size of that lemon balm behind the radishes! I think it really is the Biggest Lemon Balm in the World.

We went for a walk in Lithia Park to see how everything was looking there. The rhododendrons were blooming like crazy! It was gorgeous.

Such a quintessential Oregon plant.

We also saw the beginnings of some Manzanita berries. Manzanita means “little apples” and the berries are great to forage. Once they are a little more ripe I will do a full post on them.

At home we planted some seeds in our raised beds because it was really warm for a few days, but of course it got cold and rainy! That’s the problem with spring, you never know what’s going to happen next. It’s ok though, it should warm back up again soon and we’ll probably get some sprouts coming up by next week. I’ll take pictures as soon as they are up!

Also, we received a wonderful wedding gift from our good friend Josh.

He sure knows us well! Home brewed beer and mead (there was one more beer, but that had to be drunk immediately, of course) and a kombucha SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast)! Best present ever. I started my kombucha brew right away!

I used to brew kombucha a lot, but haven’t in a few years, so it’s nice to get back into it again. I’ve considered doing a post on how to brew it, but it seems that the internet is overloaded with kombucha posts these days. Please let me know if you’d like me too, though, and I definitely will!

One thing that I will be posting on in the future is Jun tea, which is similar to kombucha but made with green tea and honey rather than the usual black tea and sugar. I have a Jun SCOBY on the way and am super excited about it! I also have milk kefir and water kefir grains on the way, so lots of fun fermenting posts will be in the works.

Other than that, it’s back to normal life and normal jobs for us. Luckily we live in a beautiful place! I can’t wait for summer. For those of you who don’t know, Joel and I have worked in Yosemite National Park for the past 10 years and this will be our first summer in Ashland. Yosemite was gorgeous and I don’t regret a second that I was there, but we are both really excited to be living in a place we can actually call home. It’s pretty cool, to be honest!

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!