It is 31 degrees outside right now, which probably means we will lose all the fruit set on our apricot trees. They bloomed really early this year due to the nice weather, but we figured we'd get hit with frost again. It is rare that we have a good apricot harvest. Why we try to grow them in Minnesota, I don't know!
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| Apricot trees |
Now that lambing season and sugaring season are behind us, we are looking forward to chicks arriving next week, and the goats will be kidding in about a month or so. We still have plants in the greenhouse, but we also planted a lot of seeds in the garden. The weather was so beautiful, we just couldn't resist! :)
Yesterday the children and I uncovered our strawberries. The 50-60 bales of straw that we put on them last fall was pulled into the center row and trampled down. Now we will have a nice "cushion" to sit on when we pick, and hopefully we will have less weeds growing up between the rows.
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| Uncovering strawberries |
We also washed sap buckets yesterday. Normally we would just spray out the buckets, store them, and wash them more thoroughly in the spring, but this year our buckets were disgusting! The warm weather brought with it quite an abundance of flies, and much of the sap we collected was dumped because it looked like fly soup! :( Needless to say, our buckets needed a thorough cleaning! So we scrubbed them, rinsed them, and left them in the sun to dry. Then after supper, we stacked them in the sugar shack, and that ended sugaring season...not a very exciting one either!
Farming really is character building. You learn to roll with the punches and take what you get. Nothing is for certain, and you always feel very grateful when your hard work and long hours of labor are paid off by a good harvest. But sometimes you work hard for nothing. That's just life on the farm! :)
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