Wild strawberries have been fruiting for some time now, and here comes the first big domesticated one:

We're growing red Brandywine tomatoes again this year since we've had such good luck with them in the past. They are indeterminate* plants, which means that they have a vine-like growth habit and appreciate a good trellis or stake. Tired of messing with stakes and strings, I'm trying to weave these through a cattle panel for support:

These Pontiac Red potatoes are about five weeks old, and we've just put up a chicken-wire fence to help contain the mound we'll be building up over them:

Turnips, turnips, so delicious and easy to grow in our climate:

The cold frame is still booming and hasn't been covered in a month or more. The tall plant is an overwintered celery. The kale, turnips, and beets were started around January.

Tiny, tiny little apples are forming by the millions:

Tobacco took forever to sprout, then was very slow for a few weeks, but now it's exploding, and I think I'm going to have to give a bunch of starts away or just toss some in unworked soil and see what happens

Cabbages are loving the long, gentle transition from winter to summer:

No idea what this one is…it's in a patch that I occasionally hurl some cheap, outdated flower seeds into and otherwise leave alone:

* Another important feature of indeterminate tomato plants is that they bear fruit over a long period of time rather than all at once. Many people who do canning prefer determinate plants, which bear most of their fruit in one flush, but we find it easier to can frequent smaller batches.

Shy Girl Leo's two-week-old chicks take their first steps outdoors:

Aberdeen's babies at two days old and already bouncy:

No time for funny farm stories or anything like that – spring is busy busy busy, lots of things growing in the ground already and critters popping babies out right and left – but here's some pretty photos, which is probably why you're here anyway…

Spring in the orchard

Pear tree

Raspberries

Wild strawberries

Hops

Bees love dead nettle

…and there's way more of it than we could hope to eat

Horseradish

Lingonberry bushes are hanging on, and they flower, but no fruit

New garden gate for new garden fence that will keep the deer out this summer. We hope…

Storage shed under construction – to free up a nicer building that I want to use as an office

The turkale keeps on turkking

The river at dusk, after several days of unusually heavy rain

We recently enjoyed a delicious salad made mostly of "weeds":

Ingredients:

• Young dandelion leaves (feral)
• Dead nettle tops with their purple flowers (feral)
• Ox-eye daisy greens (feral)
• Chives (just starting to come back up from last year's planting)
• Turkale* sprouts (planted a few weeks ago in a cold frame)

Teri whipped up a lemon-garlic-olive oil dressing that perfectly smoothed the sharp flavor of the dandelion, and as soon as I finish this post the remains of the salad will be going into an omelet.  It feels SO good to start getting fresh produce from the garden again, especially since about the only effort involved was in gathering the greens!

* We planted turnips and kale in the cold frame last winter, not thinking of the fact that they are closely related and can interbreed.  Some of the seeds that resulted are now sprouting in the cold frame, but we really can't be sure whether we created an unintentional hybrid – so until it becomes clear what this stuff is, we're calling it "Turkale."  Either way, the greens should be tasty

Several days ago, Teri and I heard a ruckus from the field where our chickens roam. After a few seasons with poultry, you learn to distinguish mundane squabbles and triumphant “I laid an egg” squawks from their air-raid siren cacophony – and this was definitely the latter.

We looked over, and there were several crows flying in tight circles about fifty feet up. We ran, shouting, with Daks racing ahead, but the few seconds warning wasn’t enough. Two black missiles began a rapid dive side-by-side while we were still a hundred feet away.

The chickens’ shrieking grew even more frantic, and the crows disappeared behind a blackberry bush. A moment later, as the dog arrived on the scene, they flapped back up empty-taloned.

Perhaps the dog helped, but most of the credit goes to the chickens themselves, who had sought cover under the brambles. The one remaining chick was hidden in a bush with his mama just a few feet from where the crows must have grazed the ground, frightened but unharmed.

I started to contemplate shooting a crow (yes, we would eat it). They’re very smart birds with a complex language, and I expect that the word would get around among the local crows pretty quickly. I even went so far as to save a freshly dead rat as bait. I’d have to set the rat out in the field and hope for a diving attack, firing just as the bird grazed the ground to be sure no stray pellets ended up in a neighbor’s sheep. I didn’t get around to it yesterday, and put the rat out for the vultures to clean up. Always more where he came from.

This morning as Teri and I took a walk in the orchard, we saw three crows chasing each other above the field, doing loops and Immelmann turns in a tight formation…no, wait, it was two crows chasing a reddish hawk! I had read that crows will team up to drive off raptors, and felt fortunate to see it so close.

Had I successfully frightened off or killed the crows, the hawk could have claimed our field, and he’s a far more dangerous predator, one that might well have been able to target adult chickens.

It’s yet another iteration of a very common lesson here; nature is mind-bogglingly complex, and any interference on our part is likely to have unforeseen consequences, both for us and for the environment in general. I might still consider shooting an individual bird that develops a habit of preying on our chicks, but overall the crows are likely working for us more than against us.

It brings to mind a story I heard on the radio not long ago listening to an interview with author Terry Tempest-Williams. In the 1950s on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, the federal government decided that a vast area of marginal grazing land was being decimated by prairie dogs nibbling on the roots of what plants managed to survive there.

In their typical worse-than-useless manner, the feds declared that they would exterminate the prairie dogs from the area. Navajo elders disagreed with the plan, saying “If you kill all the prairie dogs there will be no one left to cry for the rain.â? The men from DC dismissed this as superstitious nonsense; surely there is no connection between prairie dogs and rain!

The plan went ahead. With poisons and guns, they succeeded in eliminating the rodents from a large area, just as they had previously done with most of the bison and human natives.

Without the prairie dogs to loosen the soil, it quickly became rain-shedding hardpan. The already sparse vegetation died of dehydration as the rainwater failed to penetrate the ground, instead running across the desert to cause flooding and erosion problems.

The Navajo elders didn’t just warn us what would happen; they laid out the exact mechanism in language a little too poetic for the bureaucratic mind to comprehend.

We – and She – will almost always be better off in the long run if we stay our hands when tempted to actively interfere with nature’s balance. We need to listen and watch and research, and remember that one of science’s greatest strengths can also be an Achilles heel – the practice of weighing only very literal and quantifiable data while ignoring other types of knowledge that are encoded in “folk” wisdom or which can only be learned through direct, subjective experience.