A sense of well being.

When things begin to green up around here, I am in awe of the beauty that surrounds me.   The sweet smell of cherry and apple blossoms fill the air.  A hint of lilac begins to show, honeysuckle bushes that cover our hedgerows are just beginning to show the promise of sweet fragrant blossoms.  As I stand under the old apple trees, I close my eyes and breathe the amazing sweetness and can almost feel the vibration of the buzzing bees as they hover over the paper white blooms.

As much as I love the cherry and apple blossoms, and I do love them.  There is another tree that holds my heart.  This tree does not embrace spring with a hint of green, but covers it's winter weary limbs with perfect tight buds in shades of purple, not sure where it got it's name, for it is the Red Bud tree.  I had never seen one of these trees until we moved here. 

The red bud tree is in the unfortunate position of growing in the back yard where the dogs hang out.  When we first moved here Oscar was a puppy, and he was soon joined by puppy Max.  And of course puppies chew on things, well the two of them chewed on trees. I believe that our dogs are really termites in disguise.  They chewed on rhododendron bushes, they chewed on the back steps, they even chewed on the outside walls of the house.
The poor red bud tree fell victim simply because her limbs hung low enough to grab.  She has persevered and still is beautiful because of her scars.

Most of the trees and flowers that are here were planted by the previous residents, you never know what is going to bloom and where. 

Spring also brings many birds to our feeders, of course occasionally it brings a bear or two.  My favorite feathered visiter is the Goldfinch, or as we call them, Pennsylvania Canaries.

This May Day, we took our love of quilting to a larger venue.  Over the winter Mom painted a Bear Claw quilt square onto a 4x4 plywood. We picked that square because of the bears that cross our property.  Normally these are placed on a barn, (Barn Art, google it, it's cool) but because the spot on the barn that we want to put it is occupied with a silo, we put it on the chicken coop, thus ours is called Coop Art. 

Today we had my favorite weather, cooling mist over the mountains, with sunshine in our valley.

Spring

 Spring is truly here, so I thought to show the joys of spring on our farm. The goats are very happy to be out of the barn for most of the day.  Maybell and Junebug, our last kids of the season are truly enjoying their new freedom. 

Luna on the alert, of course her charges are all out in the field.

The run for the far field.

Little Daisy runs to keep up.

Still running.

Gaining speed.

Not quite there yet.

Archie's favorite spot on the wheel.

Maybell takes a snooze in the sun.

June bug is completely worn out.  Her first day out was quite exhausting.

We had 2 ducks hatch in our incubator.  This is #1.

This is #2.

One of our Turkey Hens is very confused and madly in love with the truck.

Meet Elvis.

Nothing says warm weather better than a dust bath.

Final additions

So far this year we have been a little boy heavy in the barn.  The scales were tipped by 2 on the 5th.  Flo gave us 2 adorable little doe lings, little carbon copies of herself.  

Maybell came in at 6.4 lbs.

June Bug followed at 6.7 lbs. 

 We had some concerns, Flo teats are quite large and the babies couldn't get them into their mouths.  June Bug was showing signs of becoming too chilled.  With some work, the girls were fed and clothed and put to bed. I find that I have to milk Flo a bit on one side and then the girls have not trouble with size. 

All hail the great udder, giver of lots and lots of milk.

 There were signs of pop-corning today so all is good. 

  The girls may not have their daddies beautiful color, but they have their mommies waddles, my favorite goat feature of all.