Well... It's Done!

 The most amazing thing happened yesterday.  

The sun came out.

Not only did it come out - but it stayed out all day long!

Amazingly, my vegetable garden boxes were dry enough for me to plant the boxes.  ALL of the boxes.  It took me most of the morning, but my garden now has 24 tomatoes, 20 sweet peppers, 12 hot peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, butternut squash, loofah gourds, green beans, peas, sugar peas, onions (red and yellow), garlic, kale, Swiss chard, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, lots of herbs for cooking and teas, and more zinnias than you can imagine for cut-flowers.

I'll have so much to share in the coming months.  I feel that this summer's garden will be the best yet.  Do I feel this way every summer?  Maybe.

With more rain on the horizon, I thought it best to tick off a few more tasks from my list of outdoor work.   A few trees in the sheep yard needed some lower limbs removed for mowing purposes.  So, I got out my trusty, very small chainsaw and got to work.

While there, I ran into this fellow... climbing one of the trees.  It's just a black snake - a very beneficial snake to have around because they eat rodents.

I also found the best specimens of jelly ear fungus on one of the trees in the sheep yard.

All through the wooded area in the sheep and the pig yard, the Star of Bethlehem was blooming.  It's such a beautiful spring here on the farm - so many wildflowers.

Dame's rocket...

I took a quick break from the outside chores to make a new clothespin bag.  I had made a bag about 15 years ago and the bottom had rotted out.

I am a huge proponent of line-dried bed linens.  To me, there's nothing better than the smell of life-dried bed sheets!!  Then, of course, there is the energy savings from not using an electric dryer!

You might have noticed in the photo of our chickens above, that they are inside their yard.  It's that time of year again.  The foxes are teaching their kits to hunt.  We lost a chicken earlier this week.  We'll be keeping all of the birds locked in their yards for the next two weeks so that the foxes lose interest.

To Camille:

Last year, I simply tied my garlic together in bunches by the leaves and hung them in our barn (which is cool and dark) to dry out.  Once completely dried, I cut off the leaves and stored the cloves in a well ventilated crock (made for storing onions or potatoes) with a lid, inside our pantry where it is cool and dark.  The bulbs lasted an entire year like this.  The variety that I had harvested last summer was a hard-neck variety.