Spring has sprung!

I've been seeing signs of an early spring this year, although I am somewhat behind with farm chores. Spring is a time of mixed emotions for me, as it's when my mom died suddenly four years ago, but it's also my favorite time of year. Spring brings thoughts of newness: new livestock babies gamboling in the fields, new chicks hatching in the incubator, new grass and flowers sending up shoots. But since Mom died, spring has also been a time of ending, which is hard to correlate with how I normally have thought about the season.

Be that as it may, spring has sprung, and life goes along tickety-boo here at the farm. The hens have finally started laying more, (I don't put lights on my large fowl birds to stimulate their production) and I've set some hatches, better later than never I suppose.

The grass has started growing in the yard and pastures, and soon James and I will have our annual disagreement about when we should start to mow. I like to start early, to avoid having it get too high and not being able to mulch. James likes to wait, as he feels once you start to mow, the grass grows much faster, and you have to mow all the time. I am not convinced that mowing makes the grass grow faster, just dunno about that.

And this year, for the first time since before the girls were born, we're going to plant a vegetable garden! We had one when we lived in Saskatoon before the girls were born. We grew all sorts of things that year, including tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, all sorts of lettuce, potatoes, peppers, squash, pumpkins, melons, the works.

At any rate, this year I purchased some wonderful organic seeds for heirloom tomatoes through Local Harvest, from their listee Happy Cat Organics, and was lucky enough to win the seeds for free during LC's birthday celebration! I'm working on finding some nice, organic seed potatoes, as those are the two things we want to focus on this year, other than the obligatory sweet corn, of course.

Not sure how we'll keep the local deer/raccoon population out of the garden. I've considered planting it right next to the goat pen, where Toby the Anatolian Shepherd Dog lives, but that area doesn't get as much sunlight as I'd like. I do have some extra electric poultry netting I might try, normally I use it in the chicken pens, but it might work around a garden. We'll see.

DD#2 and I recently discussed getting back into goats, which has been very tempting, especially since seeing the kids born to friends, especially the cute buckling born to my soaping friend, who runs Simply Eden, where you can see pics of her goaties. But James put the kibosh on that, which is probably a good thing, as I don't really have time to do dairy these days, especially if I'm adding a garden. Maybe some other year...

Not much new going on here other than the usual spring stuff, which is pretty well typified by one of my favorite New Yorker magazine cartoons, which can be seen HERE. Well, enough blathering here in this blog, off to get some work done!