Beauty and Industry

I will start with our industriousness- you will have to wait until the end of the post for the beauty (unless, like us,  you find work sort of beautiful.) We have been working SO hard. Today, the last enormous pieces of kitchen equipment arrived, the hood for the range and the air exchange unit. If you have followed our kitchen progress on this blog, you may recall that our beautiful commercial Vulcan range was a very generous gift from a Farmer's Market customer, however, it was not usable in a commercial kitchen without the extraordinarily costly hood, ansul fire suppression system and air exchange unit. These things are huge and heavy. And of course it had to be raining when we unloaded them from the freight truck.

The hood! Hooray!

The air exchange unit. Chris and Rog  rode atop the  crate to counter-balance it as it was hauled down the driveway, which made me a tad nervous. But I suspect they had fun.

I had spent most of the day tiling the bathroom with a hodgepodge assortment of sample tiles acquired from HGA when they became obsolete, from the ReUse Center, and a few leftovers donated from friends’ tiling projects. (Meanwhile, WWOOFer Kelly  cleaned and sealed the quarry tile in the kitchen in preparation for grouting - unglamorous but important work.)

Here is the bathroom floor, about 3/4 completed. I am so delighted with the result!  Still has to be grouted  - tomorrow’s goal.

The bees have also been working hard. A peek inside the observation window of the top bar hive, showing all the lovely comb the bees have been building in the past few weeks.

Now for a bit of beauty. We are still enjoying many tulips in bloom. I love these purple tulipes with fringed edges.

Bleeding hearts are at their peak - white...

and pink.

I have begun planting flower containers, but still lots of veggies to get in if it ever dries out a bit.

A few of the fish in the silo pond. (My coy sweetie gave me the large calico koi for Mother’s Day.)
The new aquaponics towers and the tilapia are supposed to arrive this week..but tilapia need warm water and today it was only 45 F, so we are waiting for the weather to warm up, for more reasons than one!