April 7, 2021

In mid-March we were informed that Joshua is bringing some friends home from college to spend a long weekend with us. We needed to make sleeping arrangements for 2 girls and 2 guys. A little bit of panic set in as we wondered where to put them.

Katie and I rushed to put down some kind of flooring and install drywall in the guest bathroom in the hall, then we installed a toilet. This was not on our house-building schedule but, oh well. We put 2 twin beds in the house with some heaters and tables, turning it into a cabin and the girls stayed there. The guys stayed in the garage below our loft apartment. They would have to use the bathroom upstairs. It turned out to be a good weekend.

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In early April, our apple trees were blooming. I decided to let some trees bear a few fruit this year. We really want them to have one more year of root growth before really producing. Only a hand-full of trees budded, most did not. This was unusual but after reading many posts on organic orchard farmers forums, there were a lot of people from different regions all over the country having the same thing happen with their trees. There has been lots of theories but nothing conclusive on why. It appears that about 30 percent of the organic apple production will not be available this year.

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In order to grow our orchard this year, we decided to graft trees. We received our root stock and scion wood and grafted about 80 apple trees of different varieties. We hope we have better luck than last year. (see this post about our experiences last year).

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Our meat chickens have gotten big enough to move outside and we decided to try our hand at pasture raising them. We purchased an electric net fence and put them out to pasture. I know we have owls, hawks, foxes and other opportunity grabbing critters. It will be a difficult learning lesson to see if we can make this work.

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I was able to get my bees, the nun’s bees and a friend’s bees split. We ended up with 14 hives in all. We actually lost 7 hives from the winter cold, but between catching swarms and splitting the hives that survived, we were able to overcome the losses.

Our oldest son is getting married st the end of April, the week before we have scheduled chicken processing day. It will be close. We also are making 200 bars of soap and 5 leather sword scabbards for the wedding. Busy, busy, busy.