Spring sprung and I am busy

It was an arduous day.

The Captain dropped his first calf and he wants to move his 18 cows over to my pasture.  But before he can do that I have to clean up all of the trees I dropped on the fence over the winter.  Much cutting and heavy lifting.  It feels like I drank a gallon of iced tea.

Then I rototilled the new potato patch. It is 75 feet by 90 feet, or about 1/8 of an acre.  It tilled very quickly.  I left a couple of spots where I had some turnips that did not winter kill.  I will be thrilled if I get some self seeding.

I tried to burn some brush but the wood is still too green.  I tried something new, a roll of toilet paper soaked in kerosene.  It makes a nice, hot, long burning fire starter.

This was a serious test winter for us.  Several of my climbing roses winter killed down to the snow line.  I will report on the winners and losers when they start to push buds.  I also did a little bit of grafting and some of my scion wood looked winter killed.  The cambium was black.

It also looks like I lost three of my four bee hives.  The one that survived is the one I did the least fancy stuff to.  That is going to take some pondering.

I moved a young pear tree.  As  reported earlier, I removed every other row in my closest orchard.  I have a few spots in the rows that I left where the tree either died or was doing very poorly.  This pear tree came out of one of the rows I was removing and was small enough to dig up and plug into one of the holes in a row I am keeping.

Finally, I drove down to Jackson to pick up the girls.  Kubota and I did "OK" while they were gone but Kubota went bananas when they showed up.

Boys have an awkward way of showing affection.