Another Nice Day But Also A Shock

It was another nice day and I got a lot done. First I went out to the field and watered all the fruit trees and removed the winter tree guards. Two Wealthy apples, the Westfield-Seek-No-Further and one Golden Spice pear don't look good, but everything else is starting to leaf out. In the perennial bed, the gooseberries are already showing berries, and the horseradish is peeking. Even in the rhubarb bed (which I moved closer to the house last Fall) has new rhubarb growing. The garlic bed looks great. I think I will dig up the raspberries and put them in my "berry knoll" by the house. Ed and I put up a chicken wire fence around the knoll yesterday. It still needs work, but at least it's up. Anyway, I think I will rototill the area in the perennial bed where the raspberries were and plant more apple trees this fall. I went and checked the hazelnut trees and it looks like only two didn't make it. It was a hard winter and I'm actually surprised the damage wasn't worse. But my big shock came when I went to water the seedlings in the high tunnel-- almost all of my tomato seedlings were gone! Everything else was there, but the tomato plants were gone, not dead, not wilted, just plain gone. Talk about being bummmed out. I'll seed some more plants in a flat tonight, but unless we have a late Fall, they will probably not mature. I'm tempted to grow some cherry tomatoes in pots by the house just to see if I get anything.

This afternoon I hanged the clothesline and cut a 9' log in half and used the pieces as braces on the clothesline posts to keep them in place. Hopefully the braces will keep the posts from pulling out of the ground.

I took Ed with me and we started working on taking down the compost bin (the electric company doesn't like my "stick" bin by the transformer). I planned to put the compost on the field this fall anyway, so turning everything over and putting it in one big pile is ok -- I'll burn some calories doing this though. I will add the poultry litter from the chicken coop while I'm at it. I'm pretty beat, but it feels good to be back outside.