Soon. Very soon

Yesterday I went into the garden -- literally for the first time this year. The snow is nearly all gone and the gates are finally freed up. It was nice to walk around and dream of green.

The grapevines sure don't look like much at this stage, do they?

Despite (or maybe because of) being buried under two feet of snow for weeks on end, it almost looks like the rosemary made it through the winter. Usually it dies.

It's time to trim out the raspberry canes.

We're seeing these guys everywhere. Their hibernation is over.

Nothing stirring yet in the garlic boat, but then again it just emerged from the snow blanket.

But I pulled back a corner of the hay mulch and saw this, so it's just a matter of time.

In the orchard, the trees are budding. This is a plum.

The young hazelnut trees have catkins. We haven't gotten any nuts yet, but maybe this year?

The corn tires need cleaning up after last year's harvest.

Nothing in the strawberry beds yet, but as mentioned, they just got free of their snow blanket a few days ago.

The pond is absolutely brim-ful.

There's a still a bit of snow clinging to the north-facing slope by the water.

I scared up a red-winged blackbird from the cattails, where it nests every year.

It's always nice to hear the frogs -- a definite sign of spring.

Soon, very soon, I can get the garden planted and it will stir to life once again. Ah, spring!

Friday roundup

Goodness, I have been utterly scatterbrained this week. It's been busy, yes, but that's no excuse for the absolute blog silence. Apologies to all my loyal readers!

So here it is – Thursday – time for our "Friday" Roundup. These, as you recall, are so we can all check in on what steps we've taken, big or small, to inch us incrementally toward greater preparedness (regardless of what day it's posted).

Here's what we've done in the past couple of weeks:

• We butchered five animals last Wednesday.

We were getting way too crowded – not just at the feed boxes, but also too many for our property to easily support. Now we're down to ten animals, a far more manageable number. We're not expecting any calves this year either, since we currently don't have a bull.

• In anticipation of sorting out which animals to butcher, Don built another "airlock" gate. We're putting in fences and gates across critical pinch-points on our property to assist when we need to sort out animals.

We tested this latest "airlock" when shooing the animals not getting butchered down to the pasture for a couple of days. One of the targeted animals escaped, but since she couldn't get past the airlock, it was a simple matter to get her back where she needed to go. As Don and I lose our farmhands (the girls), we need to come up with ways to work smarter, not harder; and airlock gates serve that purpose.

• After the butchering was done, Don took advantage of the livestock being down in the pasture to clean up some more of the muck underneath the feedbox awning. We didn't want the livestock in the pasture for more than a day or two, since the grass is just starting to emerge and we don't want it trampled or eaten down too early; so after a couple hours of scooping poop, we closed the gate and brought the animals back up from the pasture.

• I planted seeds indoors:

• 25 cayenne peppers
• 25 basil
• 10 Brussels sprouts
• 10 broccoli
• 18 tomatoes (6 large, 12 paste)
• 10 red bell peppers

The broccoli and Brussels sprouts are just starting to come up.

It's always fun to watch an infant plant push upward.

• We picked up the four hazelnut trees we ordered and paid for last fall.

For some reason I expected these to be a lot smaller than they are, so I'm delighted they're already at such a height. Unlike the walnuts we planted last May (and may take as long as 15 years to produce), hazelnuts should bear a crop much more quickly.

Hazelnuts (sometimes called filberts) and walnuts are the two types of nuts which will successfully grow in our area. Having a permanent source of plant protein (nuts) is a valuable addition to our farm.

• It's been raining an awful lot, precluding much work in the garden, but I got a bit of a start at weeding some beds.

I noticed this little guy...

...at the edge of the pond...

...keeping a sharp eye on Lydia.

• One of our pear trees, which bears prolifically, had two large branches growing out at awkward angles.

These would get so heavily-laden with fruit in the fall that we had to prop them up with tomato cages.

So I sawed off these two large branches, and nipped off a few smaller branches growing at odd angles. The result is a much nicer-looking tree.

• I've been admiring the birds we've been seeing:

Quail:

Western kingbird:

Robin (possibly my favorite bird):

Killdeer:

The spectacular mountain bluebird:

• We ordered two pounds (!!) of flower seeds, specifically a species called lacy phacelia.

These flowers were among the mixed seeds we planted in the orchard last year.

The bees went absolutely ballistic over them.

Come to find out they're extraordinarily heavy nectar-producers. They're also friendly to cows (some farmers even plant them for grazing). We're planning on sowing the mounded hillsides of nasty clay dirt that was piled when the pond was dug. This will not only stabilize the slopes, but provide endless food for the bees.

• I'm working on the talk I'm giving on May 6 at the Northwest Preparedness Expo in Prosser, Washington. This is put on by an nifty church-based group called the Lower Valley Assembly whose purpose is "to promote the advancement of self-reliance and security within the Lower Yakima Valley in accordance with the laws of nature and the commonly held Judeo-Christian principles by which the United States of America was founded." Hopefully if anyone's in the area, you can attend the expo.

That's what we've been doing around here. How has everyone else done as far as preparedness?

Wow, a product that WORKS!!

One of the eternal questions we constantly bandy about is the question of water for our homestead.

Our well is 610 feet deep with a static level of about 450 feet. Our well pump is electric. If we lose power, we lose water. Since we live on the prairie, surface water is nonexistent.

For years, we've investigated affordable options for homestead water without much success. Solar and wind options far exceed our budget. (A few years ago we were quoted about $18,000 for a windmill of sufficient height, size, and strength to power our well -- and I don't doubt the accuracy of that quote.)

Several years ago we purchased a 1500-gallon above-ground water tank, but thus far have not installed it. One of our winter projects is to built a heavily-insulated "cool room" in the barn and install the tank hooked up to filtered roof runoff. This would provide abundant water for household use.

But what about livestock? What about the garden? Well, we may have found the answer.

We had our pond installed immediately adjacent to the garden on purpose. Its location is convenient not just to plants, but to the livestock as well. However the question of getting water out of the pond and into a stock tank (for the livestock) or to the vegetables remained to be seen.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. We had a trench dug for a project (a neighbor with a backhoe kindly did the job).

Then came days and days and days of rain -- the kind of heavy relentless downpour that leaves little checkdams of pine needles from the rivulets of water cascading down the road.

Unsurprisingly, the trench filled with water, which refused to drain out of our hard clay soil. We were tasked with removing water from a trench 30 feet long, one foot wide, and 18 inches deep.

Ah, but Don had a new secret weapon: a bilge pump.

A bilge pump, as you doubtless know, is designed to remove yucky water from the bottom-most levels of ships. It's designed to handle all kinds of junk: sediment, contaminants, etc. A few months ago Don realized a bilge pump would probably work to draw water out of the pond for whatever purpose (garden, livestock) we needed.

But we never had the opportunity to test it -- until yesterday, when he used the bilge pump to pump out the trench.

This particular model of bilge pump was astoundingly inexpensive -- $28.50. But how well did it work? And how hard was it to use?

First, Don screwed the pump to a small platform, then he got PVC connectors to attach to the inflow and outflow valves of the pump.

He dropped the pipe into the trench, and started pumping.

It -- worked -- beautifully. Astoundingly well. Fast, efficient, and easy. With every downward push of the lever, it shot out about a quart of water.

About halfway done:

Between us, it took us about 20 minutes to pump the trench almost completely empty.

The information on this Chinese-made product promised:

Well, they were right. I have seldom seen a product work so well. It more than exceeded our expectations.

The only "difficulty" was having the pump on the ground, since we had to kneel on the platform to operate it. We'll also have to be careful about leaving the pump outdoors since we're not sure how well the rubber gasket will handle extremes of temperature.

We're going to test the pump next spring and see how it works pumping water out of the pond, through a used pressure tank we salvaged, and into the garden's drip irrigation system. To do this, Don will build a platform and install the pump at waist level, and add an additional length to the handle for greater leverage. The pump's specifications indicate this shouldn't be a problem:

One of the reasons we're so delighted by this pump is because it's manual. In most of our prepping endeavors, we are trying to make sure everything stays low-tech and hand-operated (and, if possible, inexpensive).

Slowly, little by little, we're solving our water issues in affordable ways. This bilge pump is a valuable piece of the puzzle.

UPDATE: Here's the product on Amazon. It received seriously mixed reviews. All I can say is, our experience so far has been very very positive.