This is part of the new rock garden. The little plant in the middle is dwarf Bee Balm. Behind it is a Peony that was coming up in the front lawn. 

 

Forsythia

A sure sign that spring is here. The dogwood in the foreground is about to burst into flower too. I can't wait to see what color it is. The flowers are still green at the moment.

Considering that the house is 100 years old there's very little evidence of any gardens. I don't even know if the dogwood was planted or if it grew from a seed dropped by a bird.

There's a very large Hosta growing by the front porch. It needed splitting up while the new shoots are still small. I suddenly had the bright idea of potting some of the new plants and selling them. Of course that meant I would need a roadside stand. So that's what I built today using the bits of lumber from the crate the cookstove was shipped in.

I was starting to add some tree limbs to make it a little more rustic when a big storm blew up with lots of thunder and lightening. This is as far as I got before the heavens opened. -Bramble the cat had to immediately test it out! 

The finished chicken tractor

These are the two chickens we hatched in the mini incubator in December and January. The white one should start laying soon.

They're everywhere!

 

It's Spring!

And that means we've been out doing stuff. Not much blogging getting done so I've lumped a bunch of pictures together to show what we've been up to.

Since hunting season ended the deer have been coming closer and closer to the house. Now when we go out they casually look up from their grazing to see who it is and then go back to munching. This presents quite a problem when it comes to deciding where to put the garden. Last year my poor neighbor across the road completely surrounded hers with bright orange snow fence plus an electric fence and still lost almost everything! They just jump right over. So with this in mind I decided to keep things as close to the house as possible-like right outside the kitchen door!

I wanted raised beds edged in stone so last weekend when Ken was home we went up and down the creek collecting rocks. Because of the slope of the ground beside the house we started building a low retaining wall. It's coming along. I'll take more pictures as work progresses. We are still going to have to come up with some other solution to the deer problem though if we want to grow all of our food! We need a bigger garden than just this small area.

My neighbor did happen to mention that the only thing the deer don't seem to like are potatoes. What a relief! I can't imagine not growing potatoes. In fact I wanted to grow a LOT of potatoes. So this weekend while I worked on building the wall Ken tilled up a potato patch down in the field by the creek. We soon realized that it's way too small for the 50lbs of seed potatoes we bought! He's going to have to till up the whole field.

The baby rabbits are growing by leaps and bounds. I posted some pictures of them too.

Now it's after midnight and I'm falling asleep. My hot water bottle is already in bed waiting for me! Will try to write more and post more pictures tomorrow.

Ken tilling the potato patch. 

Laying the footings for the retaining wall. 

Josh flying his kite. 

The bunnies are growing

 

"If we all face the wall and close our eyes we'll be invisible!"