In which there's a mystery in the sky and a twilight meander

"It's a bird!  It's a plane!

It's a ... goat halo?"

This goat does not actually have a halo.  Photo by Monica Bretherton

A smoke ring?  Over the marijuana farm?  This is not normal.

Monica can't resist trying to frame Lupin Goat Gruff with the halo.

No, we still don't actually know what it was.  Apparently, smoke rings appear sometimes in places like Argentina, West Yorkshire, and...here?  We did not hear a "boom", btw.  It just...appeared.

???!!!???!!!

I'll update if any of the Haiku Farm residents appear to be raptured or abducted by aliens.  As of sunset this evening, everybody was in their usual spots, and only the people were looking at the sky.

After 15 minutes or so, the weird thing dispersed, and since I had my camera (phone) in my hand, I pointed it at stuff around the farm.  It's about time for an update, right?

Santa Jim (and Roo) installed a new garden gate for me this week.

This is pretty and useful!

The prior wood/wire garden gate was something we found stashed in an outbuilding when we moved here ten years ago, and it was great...until it wasn't.  The sn*w was the final straw on that poor old gate and it collapsed.

Plum blossoms cover the tree we planted for Pickles Marie in 2012.

We planted Pickles' tree down by the barn, and I walk by it at least four times each day.  The plums we harvest from this tree are small and sweet, just like she was.

Under the plum tree:  rosemary for remembrance.  It just started blooming yesterday.

Just one more day of growing, and then I'm gonna eat these

Last year the asparagus was so popular (none of it came to the house, we ate every single stalk raw, right out of the dirt) that I planted two additional beds of it for this year.  It takes a while to establish, but the beds are in old water tanks near the barn, so they are easy (and convenient!) to water and weed.

Moved these to a better location

We've tried growing raspberries before, with mixed results.  Marauding goats destroyed several plants last year, so I planted some starts inside the garden fence this year, which should help preserve them (and keep the chickens from stealing all the berries, too!)

new blueberry bushes

Our established blueberry bushes had a hard time during the drought last year, and they aren't in a spot that is easy to water.  Since we can never have enough blueberries, I planted more bushes this year--again, inside the garden to keep them safe from chickens.

Pea plants starting slowly.  The soil is still very cold.

Some years when the weather is warm, we get spinach and pea sprouts within a week of planting.  Not this year.  The spinach came up promptly, but the peas are lagging way behind.  After a very dry March (the driest on record in some parts of the Swamp, apparently), we've been making up for lost time with cold drizzle since the beginning of April.

I'm not complaining--we need the rain if we hope to avoid state-wide fire and smoke this summer.  But I'm eager to see more pea sprouts!

Forsythia doesn't mind the cold

If you live locally and want some forsythia starts, ping me.  This plant has children and grandchildren all over the yard, and I'm running out of places to put them!  They are hardy, drought-tolerant, and give us some of the very earliest cheerful flowers of spring.  The summer foliage is green, and provides shade for chickens.

Grape hyacinth.  I did not plant these.

Where do grape hyacinths come from?  They show up randomly in our landscaped beds, sometimes even in the lawn.  They are pretty...but really random.

Luna's hydrangea isn't dead, just pining.

I was afraid that winter had killed off the flowering hydrangea we planted for Luna, but last week it started sprouting leaves!  We usually plant fruit trees for dogs, but since Luna was (proudly) not a useful dog, we decided that a purely decorative plant was best for her.  The flowers are the exact color of her pretty blue eyes.

The reclining plum. 

The weight of fruit toppled the plum tree in the orchard several years ago, and we intended to cut it down but never got around to actually hauling the chainsaw up there.  So, it kept growing, flowering, and producing plums.  Now I can pick plums from this tree without a ladder!

Pear blossoms.

The pear tree has been slow to produce fruit--I think we got 3 pears a few years ago, then 5 the following year, and maybe 10 or 12 last summer.  But it's a pretty tree, and the fruit are tasty.  We hope it continues to increase the yield.

More flowers budding on the pear tree

There are lots of blossoms on it, and we have another pear tree to plant this weekend to keep it company.

Cherry bush.  It will grow to be about 6 feet tall.

Betsey learned about cherry bushes, and told me that it might be the solution to our cherry problem.  We had three trees that produced buckets of fruit for the first two years we lived here, and then they all contracted an ugly blight.  The leaves were all mottled and almost no cherries!  Worst of all:  the trees were so huge, it was impossible to treat them.

So, we finally cut them down.  And now we have a cherry bush.  I have high hopes for it.

How is your spring going?  What's blooming at your house?  The comment box is open!