The spring season is everyone's favorite on the Law Family Homestead. All for varying reasons; no more snow to shovel, the temperature is going up, the song birds are coming back, the grass is growing.
Here are some of our favorite spring photos this year:
We have a resident group of turkeys in the neighborhood, that have adopted our feeding area as one of their regular stops. Between the spilled grain from children doing chores and cows being sloppy eaters, there is plenty of grain for the local wildlife.
The other day some were using an H-brace for their preening after a rainy morning.
The toms start strutting their stuff in spring -
And the gobbling can be heard echoing around the neighbor-hood.
One of everybody's spring favorites is, of course, rhubarb!
A week or so later it is coming right along.
This has been our experiment station this past winter. Red and green kale, bok choy, and spinach are growing here.
MJW finds them irresistible. You can't see the temperature here, but when we first opened the greenhouse that day it read 80 degrees.
Although we grew these all winter the warmer temperatures have really spiked their growth, despite the spring snow (again), and we picked three pounds the other day.
The ducks and geese are also back gracing our pond.
Every now and then we are lucky enough to stumble upon a duck or goose nest which has chosen to raise their babies on our pond.
Amazingly, we had some trumpeter swans glide onto our pond twice over the last couple of weeks. They stayed about half an hour or so checking things out and then took flight. Of course the weather decided to have a temper tantrum about then and snowed-hailed ice balls on us while I was trying to take pictures. So you don't get a "good" photo, but I can at least say the three big white dots on the pond are swans.
They came back a week or so later and I caught them in a little better light!
Spring is also the time to bring out the bikes for the Law boys and see if they remember how to ride them. For some, it is learning to ride for the first time. JW2 isn't quite five years old and he's beaten his brothers - they were all six to seven years old when they learned and mastered it.
And best of all the cows are out onto green grass. There isn't a whole lot there yet, but it is a good excuse to get them out of the mud and they do find something out there to eat. If the sun will ever shine instead of raining all the time, the grass would pop. The bull frogs are beginning to croak their evening songs during chore time, and the song birds are making morning chores a musical symphony.
And of course spring time isn't complete without a new baby calf.
But we are all going to have to wait a while longer. Her due date was the 25th of April, but Miss Lilly seems inclined to hold onto her surprise for a bit longer. She truly looks like she is going to explode. It doesn't seem possible but that udder will get even bigger before she calves! Stay tuned:)