Mick and Max

The upper pasture has been pretty wet but we had to let Mick and Max up there before they went crazy. You can see Max slip in the mud at the end, no worries though he does it all the time. Just a couple of 5 year olds playing in the rain.

Stilll Raining on the Farm

Well it's official, the weather man says we are .4 inches from having the wettest spring ever! And we got .75" last night! It's making it very difficult to getting things done around the house but we have been getting by.

 We have been here for 5 years and have moved our vegetable garden 3 times now. It was originally in the fields behind the house but we've decided to leave that open for extra pasture for the horses so now we've it moved down near the house so it will be an annex to our yard. i have managed to get 12 wheel barrows of manure on it and till it twice. I hope it dries out in time to plant. We're keeping it small until we're sure this is where we want it. The whole back side is surrounded by wild day lilies so it should look pretty cool.

It's lucky that we bought a commercial mower because with this weather I've had to mow at least once when i knew the yard was too wet but the Toro pro model did a pretty good job. We even got to weed some of our flower beds.

The apple blossoms have finally arrived and the horses and goat are trying to stay dry but the chickens love the worms!

Hard work is it's own reward

Satisfaction lies in the effort,
not in the attainment.
Full effort is full victory
                  -Mahatma Gandhi

April Showers

Will the rain ever stop? April  had 5.63 inches of rain which is 2.5 inches more than average. It's making it very hard to get anything done around the farm. The lawn is ready to be mowed but it's always wet and there are some extremely wet spots. Must be Murphy's law because we just got a new (to us) mower and I've been waiting to try it out. It's a 52 inch Toro commercial zero turn walk behind we got on Craig's list and it should drastically decrease mowing time for us so we can focus on other things.

All this rain has also caused some drainage problems for us  as our entire place is on a hill. The winter melt and all this rain runs down the the hill and then down our drive way softening it up and creating deep ruts. So one of the projects for this summer will be to install drain tile to help control the water run off from melt and rain.

Cool temperatures have accompanied all this rain which has slowed the blossoming of our 8 Apple trees which is a blessing in disguise because another project we are undertaking is making a bee "hotel" for mason bees to help pollinate our apple and pear trees as well as our blueberries, blackberries and grapes. Mason bees are the slightly larger and much more docile cousins of the honey bee who live in the holes left behind by wood boring insects or woodpeckers.The buds are just starting to come out on the trees we pruned this past February so hopefully i can get it done before they blossom. I will be posting more on this later.