Let’s play “can you spot all the kittens?”

I had to dig one of them out from behind Beep Beep’s head. 😀

Butterscotch’s kittens are much harder to get pictures of.

I finally just stuck my phone in and used voice activation to take some photos, hoping it was angled right.

I got one shot that managed to include all the babies. 😀

We want to move the kittens and mamas out of their nests so we can put down fresh, clean cat beds, but don’t want to disturb them so soon after birth.

In other areas…

I took a closer look at one of our surviving blue spruces, of a group of three that had been planted way two close together, some years ago.

Most of the remaining branches have cold damage like this at the tips. It should be okay, but might take a while to recover from having its newest growth killed off.

Yesterday, I posted a photo of one area we will need to address, when the time comes for us to plant the fruit and nut trees we are planning to do in the future. Here is another area we’ll have to figure out.

Among the trees I hope we will be able to plant are Korean pine. This is a tree that needs to have a “shade shelter” for the first couple of years, and this location naturally provides that for most of the day. However, as you can see, this is also where water pools in the spring. That shade also means the snow takes a lot longer to melt away, and the ground stays frozen longer.

What we eventually want to do is get this package of hardy nut trees. It will be some time before we can afford that. In the shorter term, I hope to slowly acquire a good variety of fruit trees and bushes from this site, that can survive in our growing zone. They even have a variety of apricot that can grow in a zone 3!

This is one of the reasons I want to expand the inner yard to include the outer yard. I see no point in replacing the old and broken fences around the inner yard. If we just get rid of those (the chain link fence is still sturdy, and can at least be used as a trellis), we’ll have easier access to areas we can plant food trees and bushes.

We just have to make sure the fence around the outer yard doesn’t have any gaps or weak spots the renter’s cows can break through, if his electric fence gives out again. 🙂

We still need to finish clearing and cleaning the inner yard, but if all goes well, I hope to get started on the outer yard this summer, too. Especially if we want to start salvaging some things we’re finding to use for gardening and so one. I can foresee a time when we’ll even have greenhouses in the outer yard area. But first, we need to do a lot of clean up out there – including cleaning up a collapsing log building, and figuring out how to salvage the log building that we used to use as a chicken coop, when I was a kid. That one still looks solid.

Little by little, we’re making progress! 🙂

The Re-Farmer