Spring is in the air!

We've had some awesome weather lately and spring is in the air. On Saturday we had cool weather but partly cloudy skies with no precipitation! James decided to cut a tree down and get it into the woodshed, the start of next year's heat. And I decided to start cleaning up the garden. The chickens have spent the last 3 months in the garden devouring all the weeds and grass and fertilizing every square inch of it. On top of of that with all the heavy snow part of my greenhouse collapsed. So I have a lot of clean up to do and prepping.
We have a french drain down the middle of the garden. This drain is covered in rock and the chickens love to scratch at anything and everything. This means that rock is scattered everywhere. So that was the first big job...raking rock back to the drain.

Here you can barely see the drain path down the center of the picture...but rock everywhere.

Kelsey helped me with this fun job. Raking is a lot of work but raking rock is even more tiring. We got it done quickly though and then moved on to covering 4 beds with paper and mulch so the weeds don't start to grow back before we till. I just lay newspaper down, through on some mulch (right now I just have enough to weigh the paper down so wind won't take it away, more will come a little later) and wet it down. I have about 3 more beds to do this to plus prepping along the fence for my climbing vegetables. The chickens really dug deep along the fence and I think I'll actually have to bring in some dirt to fill it back in.

Here is the same area but raked up and the one bed covered in paper and mulch. Below are the other 3 beds papered and mulched.

I'm doing some research to determine how to rotate my crops from last year.
I'll also be doing some interesting methods to grow potatoes. More later on that.

Just thought I'd let you know we have 2 roosters. They just started crowing. We'll see how long they last. If we can get another area fenced a little away from the neighbors and my own bedroom window I might try to keep one and see if I can hatch some chicks on my own.

It's kind of blurry but here is the one rooster...on the left.


Below is our peach tree with lots of buds on it.