Spring operations starting up!

Finally, the weather is starting to act like Spring!

Vegetable plants

Over the past few weeks I have been getting materials together to plant my trees, grape vines and blueberries which are due in on April 5th.  Last year I bought 139 trees through the yearly county conservation district sales event.  Last year,  I planted 22 apple trees, 4 Asian pears,  6 peaches, 12 cherry, 25 persimmon, 25 paw-paw and 25 elderberries (and 20 spruce trees).   I actually ended up planting 145 trees due to the fact that they put a few extra trees in my order!   It was a lot of work and I vowed that this year I would scale down the order a bit.

So this year, I ordered only 6 apple trees (Honeycrisp!), 3*4 grapevines (12 total), 25 more elderberries and I forget how many blueberries ( 20, I think).  So a total of 63 "tree" plantings coming up next week (well, really the week after).

I did prep one of my gardens with horse manure mulch that I had in my barn.  There is plenty of hay and straw in that barn yet that I want to move out (it's rotting and holding moisture in the barn - it needs to come out!)  Unfortunately, this year has been so snowy and wet so far I can't actually get the tractor into the gardens to work the soil yet.  I do have my seeds started and , in fact, some are ready to go out!  Here are the plants so far:

Cabbages, tomatoes, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, artichoke, onions and eggplants.

The Trim

Yesterday evening I trimmed the bushes around the house.  I had been putting it off the last couple of years so this year they were in horrible shape.  So basically I was forced to do a hatchet job to try to get these beasts back under control.  I had boxwood, yew, azalea and Liliac bushes that all needed cleaning up.   I missed the before pictures, but here are the after pictures:

Our red azalea

Yew, boxwood, Yew, and lilac on far right

Yew

Boxwood

Lilac

Boxwood on left, azalea in front of window.  I plan on taking this azalea and splitting it, since it has two stems coming up out of the ground.

Boxwood by the chimney

The Cuttings

I took some of the azalea cuttings and dipped them in plant hormone and potted them in hopes that roots will sprout and then I can plant these cuttings at the farm (maybe put some more here too!)    The directions on the plant hormone container say that we should see roots in 3-4 weeks.  I am going to do some cuttings of the lilac, another azalea and some forsythia today.

Our red azalea cuttings!

The soup

While I was trimming the bushes, my dear wife, Katherine, was preparing vegetables for a batch of vegetable soup.  I canned some vegetable soup based on the Ball Recipe directions last year.  I like to have this soup around when I am working on the farm so that all I have to do when I come in for a meal is grab a jar and dig in (sometimes I heat it up and add meat and seasonings - sometimes I don't!).   Here is a picture of the 15 pints we canned last night:

Since I have the pressure canner out already, I am tempted to try pressure canning some chicken today!  We will see how it goes.  I still need to chip up the trimmings from last evening and start the cuttings for the other yard plants.  Its raining now, so chipping is not high on my list...