What’s mud but soil in a very confused state?? Confusion is the word of the hour. It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s too muddy to walk but the garden soil is frozen. What clothes are going to work today? The Spring chores need to be done, but everything revolves around the weather.
April is when reality collides with fantasy on multiple levels. When the park is buttoned down sometime in November, it feels like we have all the time in the world to dawdle in the studio, play music with friends and leisurely plan out our organizational tasks so that the following year (right now) we’ll be organized like we always dream about…the stuff that movies are made of. 
Now it’s mid April and I have 10 art projects that are in various states of completion, we never did get the clipper blades sharpened and 3 sheep are looking to be shorn, there’s still webwork to be done and don’t get me started about the orders I haven’t placed for the campstore yet. Steve has received our seed orders and is germinating according to frost date but we’re always trying to guess when that last frost is going to happen. The gravel needs to be hauled from inland to repair our seawall, but the small town roads are posted and inaccessible. March and April are the months that keep us honest!
The crocus are nudging us on! Steve is having a new barn built across the street to replace the circa 1900 barn that didn’t hold up to this year’s snow load. The concrete pad has been poured, the building material should come by the end of the month and we’ll be moving the season’s firewood and tractors into place by Memorial Day weekend if all goes well. More exciting to me is that he’s transforming the barn by the garden kitchen into a natural dye and printing studio so that we can add more color to our lives 3 seasons a year. Check out the June rust and botanical printing class with Samantha Verrone and Katama Murray will be here in September offering a variety of techniques to meld nature and cloth into one of a kind art pieces.
Thanks to the early Spring, the garden has already been sown with radishes, greens, carrots, peas and we have a good start on the seedlings. It’s still wet enough to continue transplanting trees around the park, we try to put in at least two for every one that has to come down. The sheep and goats are all shorn and I’ve even been able to move one of the looms out onto the deck for some weaving time in the sunshine…I weave while Steven plants 
Can you tell that it’s feeling like a really good camping season is just ahead of us? We are so excited to meet new team members who are en route from California and Tennessee…they’ll join others from Searsport, Belfast and Wiscasset. We’ve asked everyone to be here in time for Clean Up Project Week, May 19-26. If you’re free to join us, please send us an email so that we can plan to cook enough food! You can click here to read more about it. If you can’t join us, expect to meet all of the team in next month’s newsletter.
2 responses to “Mud Season”
The newsletter is a great idea….Lots of Work…but thank you for doing it. The best thing about last summer was seeing all the same families return from the previous year. It was great to see everyone again and looking forward to seeing you all again soon. We have a new addition to the family…an English Cream Golden Retriever named Sir Charles Barkley. He’s not much of a retriever…but he is great at taking things he’s not supposed to have and playing “keep away”.
I’m glad that you like it…your note means more than you could estimate. For us there’s this wonderful tug at our hearts between seeing guests year after year and that rush of satisfaction that comes from being around someone who’s only been in the park for 2 hours. AND the real magic is always those times when people settle in and make new connections…so that our world firmly becomes part of their world. Living life in a campground is hard to capture but the emotions are instantly recognizable. I can’t wait to meet Sir Charles Barkley…is he big enough to play in the dog park?
With a smile and damp knees…it’s been a long bout of rain!
Astrig