owwww!

i worked my tail off today in the garden and it was lovely! nina and ridge played with sage and jaden while i broke sunchoke stalks into bits, pulled out weeds, cleaned out beds and transplanted 153 garlic plants. here's hoping they take! i was unable to get to planting garlic in the fall but there were several volunteer plants from last summer that i dug up and planted in a 5 x 20 bed, all but a 2.5 x 10 section that has celery leftover from last year (not sure they're going to make it but i give everything a chance.

my right shoulder blade hurts like a dickens right now.

greg and i walked around the property reviewing everything. looks like we still only need to replace the 4 pears: 2 asian, 1 bartlett and 1 anjou. i'd also like to get another apple tree, perhaps the cherokee black? (can't remember if that's the name or not), a few new peach trees as our existing two are looking sad and depending on how the stella cherry is doing, maybe another one.

currently, our mature trees are: 1 tart cherry (my favorite), 2 apples, 2 peach and 1 plum that doesn't produce. we have 2 apricots and 1 stella (sweet) cherry that are little. our tart cherry has several babies around it. we plan to dig up the largest one and hopefully keep it.

behind our orchard there is a field road that is an easement for the farmer next to us to get to the other side of his property. it cuts through the wooded section of our land. greg has an idea to move the road onto his property in order to do away with the easement and hopefully give us our land back as it sheers off probably an acre (i didn't realize before just how much land we were losing from it until we walked back there today). we also hope to take back the land he farms, it is a tiny sliver but we can plant it in hay or wheat or oats and get a good crop for our needs. on our tax refund purchase list is a tiller for the tractor. we have several large patches of ground we want to sow in crops this year: hay, wheat, oats and/or mangles.

our goats are huge. soon!