Spring Has Sprung: A Photoessay

We have been starting to feel that “why isn’t it Spring yet?” antsiness lately, and discovered something terrible when we tried our usual cure for seasonlonging. It turns out we don’t have very many pictures in our flickr photostream of March, April, and May. We apparently didn’t catch the photography bug until our [...]

25 Days Of Maple Hoo Christmas: Day 1

We are so excited to finally have a really nice camera, with really nice lenses and a moderate grasp on how to use all of them here during the holiday season. As handcrafters and nostalgia-freaks, there’s nothing we love more than all the little decorations and things we’ve made and collected throughout our lives [...]

A Brave New World Of Hot Chocolate

We are huge fans of hot chocolate here at Maple Hoo. Specifically Williams-Sonoma’s peppermint hot chocolate at the holidays, adorned with our own homemade marshmallows. Of course, the peppermint hot chocolate is really only available for eight weeks a year (and we try to be good and limit our consumption of it to [...]

Slices of Summer

Back in February, I posted about our Winter stitching, and in April I posted the Spring stuff. Here it is, the mid-point of August and I haven’t shared the Summer works. Could it be because there aren’t any? Au contraire! I’m just really lazy and haven’t gotten around to taking them [...]

A Summer Dinner In Photos

One of the primary reasons we keep up this blog is to have a place to put the pictures we want to look back on and bask in. Basically, in the sweltering heat of summer we like to soak up the feeling of pictures of brisk autumn days and wintry gloamings, and in the [...]

Farm 2008: The Berries Ripen

Huzzah!

After about a month of cold and rain, the sun finally came out, just in time to ripen up the strawberries at the farm. This week’s PYO haul? Three quarts!

Unlike last week, where it took an hour to find just four berries, this week all I had to do was put my basket [...]

A Little Splash Of Pretty

I have very few regrets about the plantings of Maple Hoo, but one of them, this time of year, is the lack of forsythia. Of course, forsythias look like ass most of the year, but for a few weeks in Spring, they’re the very best. We have one scraggly little stick in the [...]

The Greening Of Maple Hoo

This morning we woke up to the excited news from Boomer that there was a daffodil blooming in our yard. Abuzz with excitement, we put on our shoes, grabbed the camera, and ran outside, ready to soak up the glorious Springness.

Ummm… okay. Well, it is, undeniably, a daffodil. It is also minuscule. [...]

It Seems To Have Sprung

The first day of Spring was two days ago, and it appears the plants in our yard got the news. I’ve spent much of this morning glaring jealously at the little cluster of crocuses at the base of our neighbor’s mailbox, until suddenly it dawned on me that we have a spot in our [...]

The Object Of My Obsession

I have a problem. A big problem. I have an obsession, and it’s starting to detract from my functionality as a contributing member of society.
Behold:

This is a picture from my workplace; it’s the view around the side of my building and across the pond out back. At a casual glance it looks [...]