Procrastination!

Where has the time gone! It seems my intentions are good but my effort lacking. I will continue to try to do a better job posting! Spring is on the way, I think. Today we are had a high of 83 degrees and lots of sunshine, yesterday 81 degrees. I need to work inside the house as much as I need to work outside! Choices, choices! And I have three baskets that need to be made: one for a wedding gift, one for a raffle donation and one for barter! Best get started....and soon!

A couple of weeks ago we had an ice storm here in the low country of SC. Not too bad in our community, but 10 miles north in town, the damage was worse and it got worse the further north you traveled. Lots of broken pines, oaks of all sorts, downed power lines, some houses damaged, etc. We were out of electricity and water only about 35 hours so we didn't have it too bad. Others were out over a week.

As the saying goes, there are always goods things to come from bad things that happen. I was blessed to have access to long leaf pine branches, broken and on the ground on our property and our neighbor's property as well. These are young pines, maybe 12-15 ft. tall and really were not damaged much by the storm. I guess being young trees, they were more supple and could bend better than older trees. Guess that is true for all of us! Anyway, I got a nice load of green needles, roughly 12-14 inches long. I find young needles are also thinner in diameter, but can be used, none-the-less. I just couldn't turn them down. So with plastic gloves on to help keep the resin off my hands, I stripped the longest and thickest needles from each of the branches.

The challenge after stripping all these needles is where to dry them! I have a screen porch that serves as my drying area for now. I placed a good handful of needles in each aluminum foil pan or across the rods of an old chicken crate. Anything to allow air flow. I try to turn them daily and give them two to three weeks to dry (depending on the amount of humidity in the air), then bundle them for storage. Although they are still green, they will turn in the sunlight to the warm brown you normally see on the ground. I like harvesting needles like this, straight from the branch, because all the needles can be placed in the same alignment. These needles are also easier to dye when green, which I hope to do as the weather warms. So I will turn these over in their containers, give them a couple of weeks and I should have about 25 two inch diameter bundles! Not bad for an afternoon's work!