Flowers and pickup trucks

Today was a wonderful, warm spring day. It was so nice, in fact, that we had to get out of Logan and find some flowers in SLC since there aren't that many flowers here yet. We went to Temple Square to find them. Temple Square has some of the most painstakingly executed and stunning landscaping you will find. I haven't bothered to do a calculation to estimate the number of bulbs that are planted there, but my SWAG has it well over 100,000 individual flower bulbs.

I have no idea what their landscaping philosophy is, but it seems to be to overload you with visual color and crab-apple blossom smell. It works wonderfully.

Can you spot the Violet among the rest of the flowers?

After we returned home from our trip to Temple Square, and Whole Foods, and REI we prepared some quick dinner and then headed back outside to feed the horses and seed our new two acre field.

OK... I promise if you read this diatribe, there will be pictures at the end. :-)

Over the past few days I have been attempting to play farmer. Let's get this straight, I am in no way claiming to be a farmer. I am about to describe our fumbling around while as we try to get our two acres put up in pasture. In practice this means that we were on the phone with Bruce a couple times a day for the last three days for "consulting".

First we had a local farmer disc the field with his real tractor/disc rig, this worked great but the field was still a pretty cloddy. Second, I used our neighbors little 50 horse tractor to harrow the field with a undersized, underweight harrow. The weenie harrow sucked, all it did was move the clods around. Not to be defeated, I loaded four railroad ties on top of he weenie harrow and it did a better job, but not good enough as the field was still pretty corrugated. Finally, I stopped overthinking the process and tied a railroad tie behind the tractor and dragged it all over the field. Success! The RR tie did a great job breaking up the clods and the leveling the field for planting. It's amazing what a great tool a big ass piece of wood can be.

The question is, how to plant our seed mix which was 15% alfafa and 85% grass? See, alfafa seed is tiny and grass seed is comparably huge. Two different sized seeds will spread at different rates if you don't have a real seeder. And we don't own a real broadcast seeder implement, all we have is one of those cheap $6 lawn seeders designed for fertilizer, not for seed. I tried it but it didn't work for shti. Gotta to old-school, I guess, we broadcast our seed by hand. We turned it it into a family affair, though, so it was fun. Joanna drove the LUV, and I put Violet in the backpack while I sat on the tailgate throwing seed out the back. Violet was a great manager, hat re-arranger and bird pointer-outer. The final product? A seeded pasture waiting for one more light harrow to cover the seed.