The other day we had the goats out in the yard, and they started running toward us just as Henry started running to the trampoline and right across their path.  Emily yelled “Henry!  Look out!”  Henry panicked and hit the deck, tornado-drill-style, right in front of a charging Banjo.  Banjo very gracefully did a picture-perfect high jump right over him, and never broke stride.  Henry cried a bit because he was scared, but he didn’t get hurt.

We had the vet out last week to see all our farm animals.  For my reference, she gave CD-T to the goats, and rabies and West Nile vaccinations to the horses.  Brad also got CD-T.  She said to give Brad injectable ivermectin once a month during warm weather months to protect him from brain-worm.  Goats can be dewormed twice or three times a year.

We planted three apple trees and a cherry tree about a month ago.  They seem to be doing fine.  If they look good next year, we’ll plant more.  We’d eventually like a nice sized orchard on the other side of the drive.  We did a lot of clearing of brush over there and Emily has been working on it with the mower.

We’ve been finding lots of snakes lately – mostly in and around the hay.  Lots of redbellies and a few garter snakes.

Our pond is full of minnows!  More than I’ve ever seen, and some really big ones too.

The plants we planted yesterday don’t look so good, and we don’t know why.  The stems are still looking okay, but the leaves are shriveled and/or brown.  It’s almost like they froze, but it didn’t get below freezing last night.  We’ll see what happens.

Emily and I switched hours with the kids today.  That means I worked this morning and played with them in the afternoon.  It was quite nice.  It’s a lot easier for me to relax and spend time with them when I’ve already gotten work out of the way.  When I have them in the morning, I feel like I need to be working.  It also meant I got to spend some one on one time with Delia, which I haven’t been doing much of lately since Henry requires a lot of chasing.  We made a kite out of a garbage bag and willow stalks that didn’t work very well (but was fun anyway) and we shoveled manure out of Cowboy’s paddock.  That may not sound like fun, but it was.

Henry continues to speed all over the place on his 4 wheeler.  I can’t believe he’s only two when I watch him ride it.   This evening we heard the four geese that have been visiting our pond coming from down Norby Rd (we hear them before we see them) so I told him to watch them land on the pond.  They chose to land on our shallow swampy pond instead, so he didn’t get to see them and was disappointed.  He ran over to his 4 wheeler and took off.  It’s really rough terrain around there, but he was determined to see the geese, and amazingly, the 4 wheeler made it!  He finally got stuck right near the pond, but I ran over and got him out.  He yelled “bye deese!” as he rode back to the driveway.

I need to read about geese.  I know they make strong pairs, but this year we have four that are always together.  Originally it was two and then the other two came.  The first two would try to chase them away, but after a while the second pair fought back and held their ground, and then I guess the original ones gave up.  Last year we had lots of ducks and this year I’ve only seen one or two on the pond all spring.  We seem to have one sandpiper that spends a lot of time on the banks of the pond too.

Today we planted the first things in the garden.

Two tomato plants – a celebrity and something else more heirloomy, can’t remember the name.

An orange bell pepper plant.

3 pumpkin plants on one hill.  They say good for jack o’ lanterns or pies.  We’ll see…

Two hills worth of pickling cucumbers.

Tons of “great lake leaf lettuce” seeds.   I forgot to keep some to sow later in the year for another crop – I’ll just get another packet if it grows and is yummy.  All their romaine lettuce plants were sold out, or I would have gotten one of those as well.

I also got green bean seeds and sweet corn.  Green beans like it warmer, so we’re waiting on those, and I haven’t looked up corn yet.

The plants and seeds were a little under $20.  I just hope it doesn’t all die.  Getting over $20 worth of food from it will be a bonus.  We won’t worry about all the time spent…  I just am not sure I’m converted to the idea of gardening yet!  It’s a lot of work!

I brought my hay over to Nora’s and her horses loved it.  It ended up being three trailer loads!

Today I mowed some of the really tall grass on the other side of the barn and along our road.  At first I found it hard to maneuver the tractor with the sickle bar, so I ended up missing spots and going over others twice – loading up the bar so I had to stop and clear it.  Then I got the hang of it.  I raked out a path through what I had cut so I’d have room to move without going over the downed grass again, and then carefully cut a few more swaths, and as long as I didn’t go over already cut grass, it worked great.  The key is to not get too aggressive and try to cut too much at once.  That’s when you start to miss grass and get it wound up in the works.

What I cut sure looks like decent hay to my very untrained eye, but I want someone who knows to look at it.  My plan is to see if Nora wants it (loose – not baled), and if she does, I’ll have the fun task of manually raking it up and loading it into my trailer.  If not, I guess I’ll just manually rake it up and load it into my trailer, and then either dump it off some place or burn it.  I hate for it to go to waste (if it’s even worth using for horses) and there’s not enough of it to get our neighbor to use his baler, and he’d have a rough time maneuvering it in there anyway.  Whatever happens, I’m happy to at least start getting rid of all the overgrowth.

I also discovered something about my tractor.  My hydraulics have never worked right, but now I’ve found a pattern.  Sometimes it would lift an implement up all the way, but usually not.  Today I realized that after the tractor has been off for a little while, if I raise the lift lever and then let the clutch out, it’ll quickly lift the implement all the way up.  Each subsequent time, however, it’ll only lift it about 1/3 of the way, and pretty weakly.  Now I have something to go on when researching this.  Oh, and my starting issue from the other day turned out to just be a loose wire.

We have big beautiful ripe blueberries in the Northern section of our field!  Delia and I picked some immature ones a week or two ago, but this afternoon I rode the 4 wheeler up there through the VERY tall grass) and saw loads of nice big blue ones.

We also have raspberries!  3 to be exact.  I ate one and it was delicious.  We planted about 9 stalks and I think about 4 or 5 of those survived, though there appear to already be some smaller ones sprouting up around them.  Most of the berries are pale and dry (either because it’s the first year they were planted or because we haven’t watered them) but there were three nice ones.