| Hops drying [photo credit: Hop’n Blueberry Farm] |
Here’s an activity for those of you who dig agritourism and local farm tours and who want to get a behind-the-scenes look at hops production: Hop’n Blueberry Farm in Black Mountain, one of the first hop farms in the state of North Carolina, is offering one-hour specialty tours at 2pm every Saturday in April. The farm is about 20 minutes from the Inn on Mill Creek B&B.
Just a quick March update on our newest garden space at the Inn on Mill Creek, the Guest Favorites Garden. While the daffodils in the Pool Garden have heralded in spring right on schedule at the Inn, located near Asheville and Black Mountain, North Carolina, the daffodils that we planted in the Guest Favorites Garden are a bit late to emerge.
| American Robin at the Inn on Mill Creek B&B, 2012 |
If ever a bird had the ability to make winter seem a distant memory while frost is still very much on the ground, it would be the American Robin. It seems like as soon as we see robins doing their stop-and-go flutter across the grass in the apple orchard at the B&B, it’s like winter never happened. Interestingly, the American Robin is a year-round resident in most of the United States, but it spends most of the winter tucked away, roosting in trees.
With Spring just a week away, we’re daydreaming of warm breezes, verdant mountain vistas, wildflowers galore, spring songbirds and…well, we thought we’d go ahead and make a list of ten reasons to visit the mountains of Western North Carolina in springtime. What is there to see and do in Spring in the NC mountains?
| Azaleas usher in spring |
Springtime in the mountains of Western North Carolina… there’s nothing
quite like it. While we always suggest late April through the month of May as
the prime time in spring for maximizing your enjoyment of the area’s colorful flora and
fauna, the season really does magically kick off each year right around March
20, with daffodil and forsythia blooms, among some other early spring flowers.
And Biltmore helps out, too, with its Biltmore Blooms celebration.
Mother Nature, let’s do this. Twenty days and counting…crocuses are starting to open at the Inn!
Small but definitely not lost in a crowd, the Downy Woodpecker is our February 2014 feature in the 12 Months of Birding at the Inn series on our blog. The Downy Woodpecker is black and white, with a splotchy or checkered-looking pattern on its wings, a white stripe down its back, and a black-and-white striped head. Males have a red patch on the backs of their heads.
The 11th annual Dine To Be Kind event, where participating local restaurants donate a portion of their sales (including take-out and bar tab) to the Asheville Humane Society and its Animal Compassion Network Department, will take place Tuesday, March 4, 2014. Just another reason to support our local restaurants, coffee shops and taverns – they are awesome supporters of lifesaving programs for pets-in-need. Have we mentioned how much we love living in an area that loves animals?
We’re installing a new garden this year at the Inn on Mill Creek, the Guest Favorites Garden. Can you guess what’s in it? That’s right, favorite plants and flowers of our guests, which we gathered from surveying them on Facebook.
| White Chocolate Chip Cookies with Cherries from the Inn on Mill Creek |
We tweaked a recipe we had for soft chocolate chip cookies, cutting some of the sugar and substituting white chocolate chips for milk chocolate, then adding dried cherries. Hello, cookie goodness. Here’s the recipe…let us know what you think!
