Watch out: wannabe farmer got her some LAND

Spring is barely here but these past weeks, I've been in the mood to get my hands dirty. I have me some real farmer boots now (green Hunter wellies) and my very own shovel, safe from the ravenous maw of the Building. Between the four of us (boots, shovel, et moi), I got my 16 trees in the ground last week, each planted the day after arriving. 

Plus two fig bushes.

And I'm totally loving it. Not that the results are impressive: planting trees isn't really about immediate gratification, as pretty much it's a lot of work and the end result is what looks like a stick stuck in the ground. 

But in my mind's eye: I can see the cherries blooming, and the plums ripening, and the whole sweet perfect triangle of my wee orchard filling up the hillside with awesomeness. 

In terms of more immediate gratification, I've got boatloads of annual seeds and plants! But it is only February, after all, and I have to wait to sow my sunflowers and bee balm and asters and hollyhocks and zinnias and cosmos and... until April. The vegetable garden goes in around the same time; good thing I got a buddy with a tiller. The shrubs around the house will go in around mid-March (we plan to have the outside of the house painted by then, so we won't stomp on the blueberries and the hydrangeas).

When I told a member of my knitting group that I was landscaping our new house, she said "oh? Are you putting in some azaleas or something?" And when I answered that I was planting sixteen trees, eleven fruit-bearing bushes, five hydrangeas, a vegetable garden, an annual garden, an herb garden, and a long, long trellis for clematis and crossvine and all sorts of lovelies, her eyes got kind of big.

There's so much left to be done, inside and out. But when I think of how far this whole project has come (we started without walls, y'all), and when I look at the barely visible silhouettes of my fruit trees on the hillside and my willows along the road, I trust that we'll get there.

The Sheetrock guy should be done by next week. The siding is on. The roof is finished. And the flooring is ordered.

Odds are real good that baby #2 will be born at this house.