Check out that spider web! Someone was very busy. 

We had a really foggy, rainy start to the week here. 

On Tuesday, we volunteered at the Lehigh County Envirothon, which is a competition between students (high school, in this case) in 5 different categories like Soil, Aquatics, Wildlife, and this year's special category, which was livestock. The students are grouped into teams, which go around to various stations and answer questions on their test forms. The winning team goes to compete at the state level. Our job as volunteers, along with Nitya, Jeff, and several others, was to grade these tests so the winners could be announced by the end of the program. 

The Envirothon was held at the Wildlands Conservancy. We took advantage of some of the nature trails during a break and did some bird watching. 

Dave and I decided to make candied ginger. Our goal was to make it by hand for significantly cheaper than the $7.50-$8 price range when we buy it pre-made in bulk, because we use a lot of it. Candied ginger is a delicious spicy treat and is really good for any sort of stomach upsets. It's also excellent at reducing motion sickness. 

We did about 4 pounds of the ginger. The trick to peeling it? Use the back of a spoon. Right now, we're giving ours extra time to dry out, because the sugar coating melted down overnight and returned to a syrup in the jar. (Odd because we dried it for hours and hours longer than the recipe called for.) We'll see how it turns out after some extra drying time. We also have lots of the yummy ginger syrup from it which we've been mixing with homemade seltzer water for ginger ale! 

When it was raining on Monday, we got a bunch of seedlings planted inside. We'll continue bringing them in at night until it really warms up outside, and we'll transplant them once they have begun to sprout. We have seeds planted for everything from pink banana squash to asparagus peas! 

In great news, Dave's new camera is on the way. (We apologize for the less than great photos in the meantime.) Business on Etsy is actually picking up...thanks to Steve and Amy for your recent purchases! :)