Our Weekend & Spring Seedling Progress

Well, it was a warm and mostly sunny weekend here, and man did we enjoy it or what! Little M and I did all sorts of fun chores outside, and kept our time inside to a minimum. First we raked up the winter's worth of bark chunks and sawdust from the carport/woodshed area, pitched them into the back of the truck, and took a full load of them down into the burn pile area in the lower field.

Ahh... all raked out and ready for more wood to be split and stacked!

One evening last week, a work friend of my husband's was over with his family to help us prune our orchard trees and have supper, we had a whole mess of twigs and branches on the ground under the orchard trees. We had managed to get all the branches piled up, so during one of Little M's naps I filled the truck bed with branches and took two loads of them down to the burn pile too.

Normally we put the bark chips and orchard trimmings in a pile area across the creek to decompose on their own back to nature, but when we took the first load down there I realized there was still a couple feet of snow on the pile, plus a big snowbank at the edge of the road... So that was a big no-go! Oh well, I guess we'll burn them and not compost them this year!

I also moved the seedlings around under the grow light so that instead of having a plastic cover over them, they have a plastic tray under them so that they can stay a bit more moist. Little M of course kept a close eye on the proceedings. We've got some Kale sprouts, some peppers, lots of onions, a bunch of cilantro, and just yesterday some marigolds coming up too.

This week I'll likely start the tomatoes, some more Kale, and hopefully more peppers will have sprouted on top of the freezer. I'm really hoping that by next weekend we'll be down in the garden doing a bit of prep work! The snow was melting really fast over the weekend with the warm sun, but there were only a few patches melted through down in the garden, the majority of the garden still had a half foot to a foot of snow on it...

In terms of other chores we did, we also raked a bunch of weeds from the side field that got a bit out of hand last summer after the riding lawn mower died. Hopefully we'll get it back up and running soon so that I'm not attempting to use the push mower on our couple acres of fields! As Little M wandered here and there, often after whichever dog I had out with us, I meandered along after her, thinking about our long term plans for the property...

Last week Little M and I went over to a coworkers house, to see one of his ewes, who had given birth a couple days earlier. She had two 3 day old lambs, and there was a hour and a half old new lamb freshly birthed by his other lamb. My coworker and his wife have a really lovely set up, 2 donkeys, 2 ewes (and now 3 baby lambs), a flock of chickens, and in the summer, a nice garden. Not to mention their cute little house that they've been slowly remodelling. All on just an acre! It really made me stop and think about how much potential we've got here on our 3ish acres of farmable land! Ah dreams for the future! :) I hope you all had a great weekend, and that your garden seedlings are coming along as nicely as mine are!