28 Apr Tue 2009
Yep, winter is finally over!
Our snow and ice is completely gone. But we are deep in mud right now. It seems to be everywhere and completely unavoidable. Cleaning up the pen yards has been trecherous with it being so wet but a definite necessity. Our teens and their friends are making good money helping to clean up what the break-up has revealed.
We've had a few hatches of chicks, ducklings and goslings already over the last couple months. Our fertility has been great in the eggs with reports of 100% although I've had at least 2 clear (out of 42) in every batch I've started here.
We had all three of our sheep sheared last month. Woohoo, more wool to spin. It was exciting to watch this done for the first time by a local school nurse slash sheep shearer. She did an exellent job with our sheep and look forward to having her do them next year too.
We are also anxiously awaiting the arrival of our new lamb/s but our only expecting ewe seems to be holding out on us. Every day we think, this must be it, better keep a close watch. But nothing comes of it other than a lot of sleepless nights. We are hoping we have a black or at least a very dark colored lamb to add variety to our flock.
We set our honey bee hives last week. Our first attempt at beekeeping. It is a very exciting and long awaited project here. The bees were very dosile when installed into the hive, not one sting, phew!
We got taps into our birch trees and they are producing about 1 1/2 -2 gallons of sap a day per tap. I heat the sap up first in the house then transfer it to a pot outside for processing. It smells so sweet in the house right now, yummy.
We started 3 flats of corn, 2 flats of brocolli, 2 flats of cauliflower, 1 flat of dill and zuccini, cucumber and tomatoes last month. The've already been transfered into larger pots and this coming weekend we will start a second batch. Our rhubarb is budding out of the ground in areas that were not covered deeply in wood chips that kept the ground frozen.
Yep, winter is finally over!