Spring with a Vengeance

With no further ado, preamble or farting around, Spring, with it's over long task list is upon us. The black flies are upon us too, making the task list into more than chores.

This past weekend, in volcanic temperatures (well, above 30deg anyway), we spent Saturday making a start on pruning the 600+ pear trees in our newly acquired 1 acre pear orchard. A local farmer decided that they were too much work for him, and offered the orchard to us. This is potentially a lot of work, for not a huge monetary reward - so, what else is new, it matches the rest of my life. What is exciting, though, is the prospect of making more pear cider, perry, than we can feasibly drink (ed. doubt it).

I also managed to get the field behind the house ploughed and disced with the old tractor. My ploughing isn't going to win any plooboy laddy prizes, but hey... The field needs a huge quantity of horse muck, and luckily we know a man with immense quantities of horse muck. Then I can plant my potatoes.

The other big task this weekend was felling, logging, drilling and plugging some hardwood logs (ash and maple growing in the wrong place) with mushroom spawn dowels. We have a mixture of shiitake and elm oyster and I have prepared 12 logs. They still need to be sealed with cheese wax and planted end-up in a special grove I have created in the woods, hopefully shady and damp enough for them to develop. Then we wait and see.

The new greenhouse is up and inflated. The beds are nearly finished and we've had the tomatoes out there on a bench for a week or so. Seed planting continues apace.

The horses are on the move; grazing them on smaller areas of pasture but keeping them moving with electric fence in an attempt to lessen the bad influence they have on my pasture. Chickens too, the mobile house is mobile again. This years meat birds (18) and additional layers (24) are ordered, and 2 Berkshire piglets are scheduled to arrive in June.