Springtime in Minnesota, it just doesn’t get any better than that. Even though we’re having another cold gloomy spring (another frost warning last night), at least it’s not snowing, and the grass is growing and the tulips are coming up. I’ve got a dozen flats in my deck greenhouse with plants waiting for it to warm up enough to get them into the ground, and my houseplants are hanging on by a thread, begging to get out and get a nice shower. My grapefruit tree has one ENORMOUS grapefruit on it, for the second year. I’ve been so encouraged at keeping it alive, I ordered some more fruit trees to grow in containers, an orange tree, finger lime, citron and guava. Exciting!!

Needless to say, I’ve been busy outside. My Bobcat is such a joy to have. It certainly makes cleaning out the barn a whole lot easier, and I’ve been finding all sorts of things to use it for, from moving cement blocks to flattening bags of cans for recycling.

I have bird feeders, hummingbird and oriole feeders out, and I’ve got lots of redwing blackbirds and cowbirds this year, besides an abundance of orioles. One of the biggest thrills I get is seeing a new bird, and I’ve seen two new ones this spring. A yellow rumped warbler,

and a gorgeous Blackburnian warbler,

We’ve been busy working on getting our pasture fencing redone, getting corner posts replaced and braced and partitioning our pastures so we can do rotational grazing. I really hate working with barbed wire, no matter how much leather I wear, I still end up bleeding. But for keeping cows in, it can’t be beat.

We had the vet come down to look at Daisy May. She’s been losing the hair on her face and now it’s spreading to rest of her body. It could be mange or ringworm (unlikely since she’s the only one who has it) or lice or a fungal thing, which would point to an immune system thing. He did a skin scraping, so we’re waiting to hear the result of that. And while he was here, we had him castrate Jerky (had to cringe watching that, and I’m not even a guy). The chickens loved the testicles, though. You would have thought it was a nice juicy grasshopper the way they grabbed and ran with them.

My mule team drawing if progressing nicely, it’s almost done.

Some funny pics,