Work, Work, Work

It is nearing my most favorite time of the year. The pretty time, the time of the year that is colorful, bright and cheerful. I know it's only late January, but for my neck of the woods winter is (probably) nearly over. Once in a while we get a late winter storm, but not very often.

Yesterday we did a lot of work around our yard. I am more determined than ever to have a garden that not only lives but thrives. I want to can as much garden produce as possible this year and I don't want to have to buy it. I'm cheap like that :)

SO, back to yesterday. It was one of those lovely, rare, beautiful, sunshine filled January days and we took it! Bundled the kids up and we spent close to 5 hours in our garden! What fun we had.

First we cleared 6 of these stumps out of the ground:

They used to be apple trees, but were gone long before we bought this house.

Then, we dug up 3 lilac bushes:

And we divided them so we can plant them along our deck, hopefully they will grow into a nice privacy screen. They weren't doing very well where they were before, so I'm crossing my fingers that they do better where we move them.

So we ended up with a clean fence line that looks like this:

We are going to build a new grape arbor here and relocate our grapes out of the back yard. It will be nice to have some more yard space for the kids to play in! :)

All of that trimming left us with a giant pile of sticks and brush:

Now, all we need to do is till in all of the leaves we spread over the garden this fall:

While I was out there the chickens said "Hi!"

I also noticed that our flowering plums have set some buds:

I know it's going to be a lot of hard work this summer, what with the garden and canning and kids and all, but I am looking forward to it.

Hard work never killed anyone, right?

RIGHT???!!!