A good way to start the month!

Hallelujah, it rained last night and this morning! We've waited over two and a half weeks for this (I know, not exactly a drought but with all the perennials we put in, weekly watering by hand is a bit of a chore). We collected all the water we could in buckets (and coolers) off the patio roof, we probably wound up with over 30 gallons! Enough for one half of one watering, but still we were awfully excited. Pa, you'll appreciate that we got the hop trellis up:



And here's our slowest growing hop, Horizon



But the hop trellis wasn't the only training system I got up today, the grapes were also rewarded for coming back from a bad frost. All I had left to do was string the wires for my 4 arm kniffen trellis, and set the earth anchors. Here I am putting in the eye bolt that gets strung to the earth anchor



And a beautiful view of our vineyard



Besides some pruning, sumac-wacking, and mowing, the only other thing I accomplished on the hill today was putting in two raspberries (Prelude, supposedly they bear very early), and 3 grapes, all Cayuga. Sarah on the other hand managed to put in three more mounds of corn for a total of 11, plant two cherry tomatoes in pots, plant hills of beans around 3 of our plum trees, and help me with the sumac-wacking.

Our zucchini are all up now



along with most of our Scarlet Runner Beans



About a third of last week's corn planting is up too



In other news, we had a small grub problem in our rhubarb, but Sarah was happy to salvage the ungrubby part of the stalks



And we can't expect people to ever read our blog unless we include cute pictures of our animals, so here is Gerard, quite content to be out of the rain, but still out of the house



But even a cat can be unphotogenic!



And Roscoe truly enjoys our slow drives to and from the hill; it's fast enough to smell at super speed, but slow enough to be able to breath (and avoid choking on one's jowls). He takes his job of sniffing the neighborhood very seriously






But even at 30 mph, he still has to take breaks



Oh, I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but we killed our keg of Red Lager. What color that beer had!



Cheers!