Spring cleaning - and other random

Spent a great deal of last weekend with a chain saw in my hands, cutting tree limbs and full trees from the area around the garden. Steven and I have a pretty good system, when all is going well - he does a lot of the heavy lifting, and when a tree is down and we go to cut it up for firewood, he "feeds" it across the cutting area, so I just chop, chop, chop. Works pretty well, but my upper body strength is lacking after the winter, so my arms were sore a lot from the weight of my Husqvarna.

And then there is all the hauling of the brush to either the brush pile, or the goat pen (certain kinds they like to chew on).

(Steven cutting out some sucker trees)

I decided to do a type of time-lapse of images of the garden over the next 12 months, so I climbed a tree to try to take a photo of the entire main garden as it is now -- as we begin to clean it up, rake, and get ready for tilling:

(This is the main garden only - the one we have tilled for years, and have worked the most compost/organic matter into, etc. We have broken out two other new areas in the past couple of years - one for the quantity of potatoes I want to plant; and another area in the front yard for special projects) (you can click on the image to see it larger -that is our bee hive on the back left)

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Many mornings walking out to my car to go to work, it is very dark. Especially like today, when there is heavy cloud cover, and it's before dawn. I have to walk about 50 yards to the shed where my car is, which has no electrical power or lights. I'm always afraid I'm going to walk right into a skunk or something. Could happen, you know. I've seen skunks in there in the past.

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Ducks have started laying eggs again - so I guess that is real sign of spring despite the fact we got a bit of sleet/snow overnight (that has already melted). It's still cold, but is supposed to warm up over the next few days. Time to get the nesting boxes ready for the ducks, and for whatever hen goes broody first in the chicken house.

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We got our Stark Bros. order by UPS today! Yay! A bit cold for receiving fruit trees and putting them out, for sure -- but it is supposed to warm up over the next few days enough we should be able to put them in the ground! :)