Fruits of our labor

In my constant need to be as self sufficient as I possibly can, I spent the afternoon planting fruit trees. Yea! I've wanted fruit trees ever since we moved out to the sticks and it looks like this year is the year of the fruit tree. I think I've just figured out that we're probably gonna be living here forever (knock on wood) and it's time to actually LIVE here. I, of course, didn't do any research at all on buying fruit trees and just went to Wally World and bought some. I started out with two sweet cherry trees and one sour tree and while loading them in the truck read that they need a pollinator tree. Doh. Naturally the store doesn't sell the pollinator tree. Double Doh. Why would you sell a fruit tree but not the pollinator tree that makes it produce fruit? So for instance I bought two Bing cherry trees. They need a Stella Sweet cherry tree planted around them to pollinate their buds to produce the cherry. So I went to Lowes and sure enough they had the Stella Sweet. Victory! BUT, then I looked at the sour cherry tree, a Montmorency cherry tree, and it needed a pollinator tree as well. They listed a bunch of trees and there on the list was another Montmorency tree. So I bought another one at Lowes. I guess they pollinate each other? This is about the time I started kicking myself about not doing a little research. So I went out to buy several different kinds of fruit trees and ended up coming home with five cherry trees. If this all works then we are going to have cherries coming out of our ears. And I can't wait.

I also discovered that buying the trees was a lot more fun than planting them. Luckily we've been getting a decent amount of rain so the ground is nice and soft, great for digging big holes. I was almost done with the last tree and decided to let the goats out to graze the back yard a bit. Bad idea. I let them out and Dym, the Momma, goes B-lining for the freshly planted trees. I thought "What can she do with trees with no leaves on them?" HA! She ran right up to the nearest one and ripped off the lowest branch (one of only five branches I might add) and proceeded to eat it whole. I just stood there with my mouth open watching the massacre. After a lot of screaming and waving my arms she moved off to graze elsewhere (away from the crazy woman). So the goats aren't allowed in the back yard anymore. It was really just a matter of time, the garden seeds will be planted in a month and other things will start to bloom soon.....and the goats eat EVERYTHING. So, the newest project is to fence in part of the walnut grove for the goats. There they can eat to their hearts desire while not eating anything they're not supposed to. Plus they can take care of our poison ivy problem in the grove (a delicacy for goats).

Deceiving picture, I actually dug ALL the holes minus half of one.  

Motorcycle babe.....we're gonna need another motorcycle.