A Little Garden Prep and a Little Family History

    With the advent of the warmer weather my thoughts have been turning to my vegetable garden.  I've been trying to get the last portion covered with cardboard and straw. I also mucked out the area around the goat barn, hauling about 6 wheelbarrow loads of manure mixed with straw around to the vegetable garden in the front yard.  This has always been a task that I have dreaded as it is very difficult to break up the heavily layered muck with my scoop shovel.  Not so this year. I broke down and bought me the proper tool for the job, a manure fork. It looks very much like a pitch fork, the major difference being that the tines are a bit less pointy. The job was so much easier with the right tool. Besides, it could be useful as a prop for family photos.  I'm hoping it will also be helpful in mucking out the chicken and duck pens. Between, the goats, the ducks, the chickens and my two compost piles we will have produced on the premises most of the fertilizer needed for our vegetable garden. I would still like to make one trip to my friend's horse farm for a pickup load of well composted horse manure.

I put the tomato cages around the rhubarb to protect it from the ducks

    The weather has been unusually mild for the past two months. January felt more like February usually feels. Then February has felt more like March. I'm thinking my corn will probably do very well this year if that pattern holds for the remainder of the year.  I may even be able to plant a few weeks earlier than normal. My rhubarb is up a full month earlier than normal and the fruit trees look like they are going to bloom early.  Normally the rhubarb is barely up in time for me to get a rhubarb pie for my birthday. While the warmer weather may bode well for the vegetable garden, I'm not sure how it will affect the bees. I'm suspicious of any weather patterns outside of the norm.

    Linda and I were both delighted to have a visit from the Kangs this week. Sarah drove up Wednesday with the younger two thirds of the Kanglings to take Dong Bin, their visiting cousin, to SeaTac to catch a flight back to Korea. We got a two day visit out of the deal. I wasn't able to spend as much time with them as I would have liked, but I did get to cook breakfast for them twice. I cooked sour dough blueberry waffles one morning and sausage egg Mcmuffins the next.  I had some volunteer help at the Beez Neez from Elise, Hannah, and Chloe.  I also enjoyed  a little family history time with Sarah. She is lobbying for me to work on the John Maythem and Catherine Guckian family. They were married in Ohio in 1838, but John Maythem was born in England and Catherine Guckian was born in Ireland. I've not done any research before where I've successfully traced someone back to Europe.  It should prove an interesting challenge.

    I watched a RootsTech video this past week about newspapers.com, an Ancestry.com subsidiary.  I played around with the website for a few hours and found some interesting tidbits.  I searched some issues of the Tiller and Toiler from Larned, Kansas. I found an announcement for a farm sale where Frank Rolo was preparing to move to Oregon. Another issue had an item regarding the sheriff arresting Frank Rolo's hired man for theft.  There was also a detailed report of a letter from Mrs. Frank Rolo in Oregon to her sister in Larned, Kansas regarding the suicide of a step-brother in Oregon.  There was a lot of information regarding relationships. Newspapers can be an amazing source if they are available for the particular time and place you are researching.