18
Jun
2021

April on the Farm

Here are a bunch of photos and a video from April.  We are always amazed that everyday we see something new that fills us with wonder and excitement.  We’re so grateful to get to experience so much nature everyday. 

April was filled with working on our food forest / garden… the fencing, the seedlings, and planting fruit trees and berry bushes. 

Gorgeous sunrise

Seedlings getting out of control… needed to make the time to thin them out.
putting the swarm traps in the trees

Ended the day with a gorgeous sunset

Sunrise in the East (out our back door), sunset in the West (out our front door) on the same day
I love that the chickens put themselves to bed every evening when the sun starts going down

3rd annual sunrise devotional on Easter morning. This was our first year watching the sunrise outside instead of just out the window.

Our neighbors fenced off the pasture that is behind our property line so now we get to see their cows. We walked over to the fence to meet the cows on Easter morning.

On that hunt for the wild asparagus that the previous owners mentioned was somewhere on our land. I saw these plants poking up and thought that maybe it might be asparagus. … but as the plants continued to grow it became obvious that it wasn’t asparagus after all.
Walked down to another neighbor’s house to meet them one Sunday evening. Got to meet their adorable cows and donkeys as well.

Everything is turning green!

Our Redbud tree (right outside our kitchen window) started getting really pretty purple flowers all over it. This is the only one on our property, but we saw these trees all over the place around here as we drove around.
Transplanted some seedlings so I could thin them out.

See that white squirrel in the grass across the street? That’s Dominic. He lives in our neighbor’s tree across the street but comes over to our side occasionally. When we first moved in and noticed him, the kids named him and we’re always excited when we see him. The rest of the squirrels that we have around here are brown or gray. He’s the only white one we’ve seen.

Sofia

Spent 11 hours one Saturday separating out seedlings and transplanting into bigger cups, trying to keep all that I could.
I remember having this kind of flower in our flower bed at the house that I grew up in.

Sunrise with fluffy clouds

Aida climbed to the top of the tree
This is the first time we’ve ever had our own yard… so we got our first lawn mower! Jershon had a blast driving it for the first time.

mowing the lawn with daddy
Merv meeting the neighbor cows

 

I love the contrast with the purple and green

 

Still working on the garden fencing project

 

Getting ready for this baby to come

 

We had a random snowstorm in the middle of April. Luckily the few plants that we had already planted survived.

Some of these tomatoes are getting super big

 

Found a toad in the garden while working on the fence

 

Evelyn picked some flowers for us from the yard and left them with a little love note

 

It’s cute to peek out the window and see the kittens’ napping positions.

My view as I was laying in bed, getting ready to roll my 9 month pregnant belly over and get up for the day

 

time to harden off the seedlings so we can move them to the garden. On a time crunch now as my due date was only a couple weeks away

Our fruit trees arrived at the end of the month and we spent an evening planting all 17 trees. We’ve got 3 peach (Redhaven, Flamin’Fury and Reliance), 2 Nectarine (Hardired and Fantasia ), 3 cherry (BlackGold, Bing, and Stella), 2 Plum (Methley and Santa Rosa), 3 Apple (Winecrisp, Gala, and Golden Delicious), 2 European Pear (Moonglow and Sunrise), 2 Asian Pear (Yoinashi and Korean Giant) … so with the fruit cocktail tree that we already planted in March, that brings us up to 18 fruit trees.  … we might be crazy.  But you know what they say “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

While we were planting our fruit trees, we found some glowing larvae in the dirt. After googling it, we found out that it was firefly larvae.

One morning, Jershon texted me while he was out with Merv on their early morning walk around the land… he found the wild asparagus!
It was way out in our pasture. So random.
Our fruit trees… although they still mostly just looked like sticks at this point.

We found these 3 different egg shells near our house (all in different spots) over the course of a couple days. Evidence of springtime babies.

 

Jershon only gave us a clue as to where the wild asparagus was so the kids and I went on a hunt that morning to see if we could spot it ourselves…
Found it. There were 2 asparagus stalks. One was super tall and the other was really fat.

Cooked up the wild asparagus that evening and ate it.
Oh, and we also go our berry bushes/vines in the mail and planted those. 3 Grape (Concord, Mars, and Venus), Lingonberry (Dwarf and Balsgard), Currant (Jonkheer Van Tets and Rolam Red), 2 Blueberry (Patriot and Bluecrop), 2 Raspberry (Fall Gold and Heritage), 1 Blackberry (Ouachita)

Agnes on top of the chicken coop

 

End of April egg count: 232

2 Responses
  1. Melanie Mauer
    Reply

    Your redbud blossoms are edible and will look so pretty in salads 🙂 It’s so fun to catch up with all you’ve been doing on the farm! Hope that firefly larvae is foretelling some pretty dusk activity!

    1. Shelly
      Reply

      That’s so awesome! I had no idea. I just looked it up and saw that the pea pod things that grow on it after the blooms drop are edible as well. So cool!

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