So? Are we all champing at the bit, getting ready to fire up that rototiller or are we groaning about all the cleaning up we didn't do last fall?
I did my annual Tilling of The Garden yesterday for my neighbors and helped do some other stuff since I had my tractor over there. That got me off of my butt to try to clean out my garden spot. It's about 2,400 ft² and got horribly overgrown...mostly with thorny thickets. I hooked up a cultivator to my tractor and pulled up & drug most of them off, but there's still a perimeter of them around the 6 row electric fence. They're unsightly, and the fence won't work with them touching it. It's gonna rain all day tomorrow. I'll go out later this week, roto-till the main area to turn under the remaining thickets, maybe drag the cultivator again, and try to clean up around the perimeter. I may end up removing the strands of electric fence so I can get at things better, and then restring it. *sigh* If I do replant, I'm gonna have to install another single-strand fence around the existing one to keep the deer out...they jump the 6' electric fence I have there now (I've talked about this before.) I'm told that another fence about 3' out from the existing one will make them pause, not realizing that they can easily jump both...apparently they have poor depth-perception. What sucks is my neighbors only have a 4' mesh fence around their garden and it remains unmolested the entire season (except by rabbits.) My starters get eaten within days of planting. This is my garden when I first put it in. It does not look like that now.
I told my daughter I was going to pull the thorny stuff up but she doesn't want me to as they are black raspberry bushes. They can stay in their patch! I don't need them in the garden, much as I like them in pie.
I went by my friend's greenhouse today. We're gonna work out a trade on some seeds & plants. I was walking my creek a while ago and came across this: It's a chicken/hog feeder that's in pretty good shape. When the investor fixed this place up, the contractors drug all sorts of stuff out-of-sight. They left an old oil tank up by the fire trail, left (3) 55 gallon barrels and an old cast stove in the shed, but drug this all the way down the ravine to the creek. Go figger... My friend has chickens and can use this, so we're gonna trade. I just gotta figure out a way to drag it back up the hill and get it into my truck...and I gotta evict the mice that are living in it.
Do you have a winch on your tractor? That would work to pull it out of the woods. I started hardening off beets and onions yesterday, partly because I am out of space on the shelves. It will still be weeks before the snow is gone and the ground is thawed, but I will be heating the small greenhouse by the end of the week. We have decided to get a few chickens this spring, so that will begin at the end of the week as well.
No, a winch is one of the items I've yet to buy. The thing seems to be made of light thin gauge galvanized steel. It's too far off the road for a winch to reach, but you got me thinking. I just bought a new Gorilla yard cart. I could take off the sides, strap the feeder to it, tie a rope to the handle, loop the rope around a tree, then tie it to the tractor & pull it up the hill. I could probably pull it up by hand.
So fixing up the garden is a bigger task than I thought. I went out today to pull each course of the fence wire through the guides so I can work in the garden unimpeded, and then just restring the wires. That's not gonna happen. The brambles are so thick that they've entwined themselves around all 8 rows of wire. I cannot pull the wire through the thickets. I'm gonna have to cut the wire in sections to free it and then reinstall it. It's not that big of a deal but this is gonna take longer than I thought. This is what you get when you love projects but hate process.
That was fast ! Ours have not even began to make a vine yet, let alone have blossoms, @Dwight Ward . Both Bobby and I love the Moonflowers, they are just so amazingly beautiful and the scent is heavenly. We are pretty much still in the iris stage of having flowers, but others should be blooming before too much longer.
I'm not certain I've ever seen one. From the Better Homes & Gardens site: Moonflower is a North American native and was founded near Jamestown, Virginia.
If I still lived in Fairfax County, I'd ask the woman across the street. She was big into "native" plants. It's a "thing."
We called our angels trumpets Fred cause we could not remember Brugmansia or Burgmansia or... They are an almost tree like plant that we had to bring in in winter. Moonflowers that grow wild here are on vines. Devils' apple grow like shrubs here and people save the thorny seed pods to start them year to year. Sometimes I think they must all be related by the lovely evening smells and blossoms.