It's still a long way till spring, but in between rain showers I walked out and took a close look at the garden, and there are some encouraging signs.

I also wanted to share some recommendations with you.

For your spring planting pleasure, enjoy perusing the website of Floret Flowers. If this doesn't make you want to order some seeds and start things blooming in your yard, I don't know what will.

A friend introduced me to a service in Berkeley, Three Stone Hearth. They make prepared food that you take home and warm up - and all their recipes are cooked using pastured, grassfed, organic products from local farms. We are fond of their soups, which I like to pick up for days when I bake bread. I'm imagining this will be a great service after I start school, too - one night a week I will not need to cook. Hooray!

Lastly, we are now in the process of figuring out how to add three chickens to our current flock, for optimal egg production. We ordered our coop-ready chicks two years ago from Dare 2 Dream Farms, and we'll order from them again, though we might get hens that are pullet-sized hens this time. It's a family farm and they deliver all over California. They guarantee their chickens, and will even build a coop for you, stock it with food and water, and put in the bedding, if you like! I've almost decided on Wyandottes this time around - I'll let you know what happens.

Just so you know, none of these are affiliate links. These companies have not paid me to recommend them. This website will always remain ad-free. All my recommendations come from an honest place - they are all products and services that we have used and appreciated, for one reason or another.

It's looking like rain in our forecast (yay!) for a week at least, so it was nice to get outside for a moment and appreciate the little signs that winter will not last forever!