King of the Farm & Pruning Peach Trees

Our ram, Hades, is kind of an ornery old cuss. He's pretty convinced he's cattle, not sheep. This weekend Ryan moved him from being in with his ladies to being with the cows and bull.

Here, the cows are running in fear. It's a stampede!

Note that this ram is smaller even than the calves. But like I said, he is ornery. He and the bull are sparring occasionally, but Hades is winning.

Hades will do anything it takes to be the undisputed King of the Farm. 


We also worked on pruning the peach tree on Friday night. It hasn't been well pruned in years, we were trying to allow it to recover from some ice damage two years ago. Here is the peach tree before pruning:

I did lots of research about pruning peach trees, and apparently they do better with fairly severe pruning. So Ryan and I worked on it for some time and yet still didn't really get it all done.

Some branches had gotten a bit large and overgrown.

It's hard to see the lopers in that last picture, but you can certainly see Ryan trying to cut the branch off! Here are pictures of the peach tree after the pruning:

I feel like my camera is inadequate to capture how much we did cut off, but we really did cut quite a bit. When I was a girl, my mom used to cut branches off our apple tree about this time of year and put them in a vase. The buds still bloom, and are a bright cheerful greeting for spring. Since I had so many branches trimmed anyway, I made a big arrangement.

I will post a picture of it when it blooms fully!


And now for our Hazel pictures of the day. Ryan has some oats right now for our lactating ewes, and he's been filling containers of it for Hazel to throw to the chickens.

She loves this newest activity!