UPDATE FOR THE FIRST OF MAY 2013

Things here are going well, or at least as well as can be expected. Our new honey bees appear to be happy and setting up housekeeping in their new hives.

 

The Horses have been very good lately, wanting to please more than ever before. Janice and Andria took them for a ride on Sunday for about 1 1/2 miles and they did well. Of Course they are little out of shape from sitting all winter.
The baby goats are all big enough to wean and sell, which will happen very soon.

 

I started to remove some of the mountain of dirt from the upper driveway. Prior to that Janice and I dug in a used tire retaining wall around the west rear corner of the horses barn as Flash had stomped a pretty large hole in the west stall. After the repair I moved a lot of dirt to try to help keep the dirt from coming out from under the barn wall. There were several areas in the paddock where sudden drops were left, after having some stumps removed, which I tried to repair and smooth out. There is still a lot to do.

 

In the picture above the large pile of dirt at the back of the upper driveway used to be over twice as big. I spent about 5-6 hours on the tractor moving what I got moved. OK, so my tractor is a compact, it's better than a wheel barrow.

 One little chore Janice and I took care of yesterday was to move a few stock panels to the top of the garden in the center of the yard. We felt we needed to do this for two reasons. One, we graze the horses on what others would call lawn, and Flash has been known to taste things that look good to him that are really for us, like the really nice Asparagus spear. Then Second We have a lot of deer in this area and several think everything we have planted is for them, so hopefully this will discourage their munching lips. 

 As you can see in the above picture Janice has started that stack block wall below the Filbert Hedge. It is slow heavy work and I help what I can, but Janice does most of this, I just move some block around where it's easier for her to reach.

 As you can see by the line of pallets of block in the back, it is a long process. It's also hard to see but between the stack block wall being built and the river rock wall in front we have planted six apple and pear trees across that area. They are still pretty small as I only grafted them year before last.

The cedar stump in the middle of the wall that didn't get ground this year, was a good location for our Grizzly Bear.