Spring Fever

It's been a busy time here at Outlaw Farm. We've dug two new vegetable beds and are about to dig one more at least. The first two were for the potatoes and onions, and the next will be for the birdhouse gourds and Jerusalem artichokes. Sixty one trees have been planted so far. The latest were native wild fruit trees. Blackberry, elderberry, black chokeberry and paw paw were planted on the edge of the wood lot, and serviceberry, golden currant, black cherry, wild plum, persimmon and red mulberry were planted in the orchard. There was five of each of these, except for the blackberry, where we had six. It took some digging to get all these in, because the ground is so full of rocks that I had to use a tree bar and post hole digger to get them in. I was averaging a five gallon buck of stones for every five trees.

These stones won't go to waste though. I am saving them to make corner posts for the livestock pastures. The idea is to make cylinders of welded fence wire and fill the cylinders with the stones. This will save me having to buy fence posts and then struggle getting them in the ground. The cylinders are kept in place by a couple of t posts and just sit on the ground rather than in it.

On a sad note, the kitten we found in the barn died. Whether mom had abandoned her, we don't know. I have seen Midnight about since so nothing happened to her. Hopefully the kitten was just one she had left behind, and the rest of the litter are doing okay.

The next jobs are more planting. I have more paw paw and elderberry to plant as well as two types of grapes. The grapes will be trained up and along the fence separating the orchard from the front yard.

I managed to get a truck load of manure last night. A friend of ours has cows and a mule, and this was a load from last winter when the snow storm hit us. He had struggled to get feed out the animals and the hay was frozen, making it difficult to  remove the netting. As he usually spreads his manure with machinery, this load was of no use to him as the netting would jam up the spreader. For us it's perfect as it's matured well and pulling out the odd length of netting by hand is no big deal. There is more to be had when this load is used up too.

One last point. This blog is more of a journal for our benefit, but if you are reading it and you find something we had done that you like, then please feel free to try it. That's what blogs are for in my mind. I'm a member of several homesteading forums, and although there are lots of great information on them, there seems to be a lot of politics and religious opinions posted on them, that tends to be a little tiring at times. I would like to state here and now, that apart from this paragraph, you will never see me write about politics, religion, prepping, conspiracies, or anything else that I consider to be private. If you do, then you are more than welcome to flame me.