This past week has been up and down here on the little homestead. We are still fighting the tummy flu, but not as bad as last week. Some of the little ones are over it all together, and others have had a few relapses. Hubby is ok thankfully, but I’m still fighting it. I think I really just need some extra sleep and that would help so much.
Earlier in the week most of the snow had melted here and we wanted to start pruning the apple trees before the buds started. They badly needed work! The trees were at least 12 years old, and planted by the last owners. We had never pruned them, but they did produce a lot of apples most years. Still they were suppose to be semi dwarfs and were starting to get much bigger then they should be! We found a great YouTube channel with demonstrations on how to prune apple trees. I highly recommend Stephen Hayes UK videos!
We still have more pruning we want to do on the trees, as I think the tall leaders need to be cut back. But now that the trees are budding we’ll wait until next winter to do that. Hubby was also worried about possibly hurting the tree by taking off to much to soon.
The first two photos below are before shots, the third is an after. It looks so much better! For some reason I’m missing an after photo of the first tree.
A video tour of our homestead on April 8th.
A few photos of puppy, just because he’s cute. 
In the middle of the week I was feeling a little better and started getting my seeds started. Tuesday I started:
- 37 Heinz Tomatoes
- 11 Jersey Giant Tomatoes
- 5 Golden King of Siberia Tomatoes
- 12 Sub Arctic Plenty Tomatoes
- 10 Mini Red Bell Peppers
- 8 Paradicsom Peppers
- 18 Basil plants
- 18 Sage plants
- 18 Thyme plants
- 18 Giant Cape Gooseberry’s
- 18 Yellow Ground Cherries
- 36 Huckleberries
That’s not a bad start to the season. They are all tucked safely into the greenhouse and I hope to see they start sprouting in a few more days.
We had a LOT of rain this week and the news had been buzzing about a big winter storm coming. I’m not to worried about a big snow storm, but I don’t like it when they start talking heavy freezing rain. It does so much more damage. We were suppose to get hit with the storm on Thursday. When we woke up it wasn’t doing anything outside yet, but by about 8:30 you could hardly see out the window. This only lasted a few hours, then it stopped. All afternoon the weather was fairly clear and I started to think we missed the storm. Nope, it had not arrived yet. The freezing rain started late in the evening and the winds kept picking up all night.
When we woke up this morning, our alarm clocks were flashing. So at some point during the night the power had been off. For how long I don’t know. We all over slept because it was so dark out and not having an alarm didn’t help. lol The windows were coated in ice and it was still raining out. We had a good half inch of ice on everything. All the schools and buses in the area were shut down. Also many roads because so many telephone poles and hydro lines were down. Our area had about 30 000 people out of power and last I had heard Ontario was 115,000 with out. Our power flicked and serged a few times during the day but staid on for the most part.
Kim Mills on Google+
