April begins!

My first work weekend in April found me looking at a full weekend to work on the homestead with a reasonable expectation of nice weather throughout.

Took my leather gloves and shears to work with me on Friday and scoured the forest edges around my place of employment, snipping off the apical ends of a fair assortment of the wild, highly thorned Blackberry canes that run rampant there. I've been reading about propagating them, and had hoped to get some cuttings from these canes to root into new plants that I could then cultivate on the farm. I picked about 5lbs of blackberries from various plants there last summer, and they were quite delicious.

Getting home after work, I snipped them up and planted them in some old nursery cells, upside down as I read to in my best propagation book. Ended up with quite a bit of the cuttings left over, which I might try direct-planting in a location somewhere on the farm to see how they fare. I already have some healthy stands of blackberries along the wooded edge by the creek, so if I can get these going, it'll be interesting to compare them.

After a bummer of an evening on Friday night (my truck got broken into while I was helping a good friend celebrate her birthday in Columbus), I got up early-ish on Saturday and got to work. Managed to get two of the bigger garden beds across the front of the house tilled and raked even (after a week of no rain, the soil was the perfect consistency for this). I opted to leave it at that. Until I can get this space planted, it seems like a bad idea to tear up the rest of the beds.

Had help planting some more peas in the big garden bed, despite the gale-force winds that sprung up (no joke, I had to jump up and run to chase a 60-gallon barrel rolling across my yard, such was the force of the wind). I had hoped to plant some lettuce, herbs and carrots, but in wind like that, it would have been silly to even try.

So I went shopping instead, and picked up some T-posts, wire, and a post-basher-in-er. Used those to install a New York Muscat grape and the beginnings of what will be a support system for it as it grows.

The weather report suggests good weather tomorrow, so hopefully I can make up for lost ground and get some actual seeds in the ground. Feel like I'm really falling behind planting my early crops at this point...