So not going to do a lot of editing here. Again. Just going to talk through the photos from being up there again this last weekend.
I did not plant any raspberries this spring. Had planned to. Had even ordered plants. I sacrificed them for the sake of my body and thinking the trees were more important when I did not have time to do both trees and raspberry crowns. Turns out we have a patch already on the property, flowering nicely. We will still plant more, but nice to see we will have berries to harvest there, this year.
We found them walking to the far northeastern side of the field to show Patti’s sister Cindy (who came along to see the property and camp out with us) what the view was like from the high point of the fields.
On the walk back down I took this photo of the whole raspberry patch. Maybe 25 feet long and ten feet deep. Probably the last vestiges of what was part of a working farm decades ago.
This is a black currant that was given to me by a friend which he had propagated by layering one of his own plants. Currently planted in the high fenced area where the grafts I made this spring are sitting.
This is one of my grafts of our apple tree Nell and I grew from seed a decade ago, on a standard Antonovka rootstock.
And another, Antonovka again. These trees should live over a century.
Here is one grafted onto MM-111 root stock. Will not get as large as the standards, but will produce a few years earlier, and still outlive me, though not likely to outlive my kids.
This is a special tree. It is the only one of the grafts to take from an old dead friend’s orchard. I really did not know what I was doing, was one of my first attempts at grafting, but it is a Fireside apple, which was his favorite. One of mine as well. The orchardist Dave McGreggor is not fond of them for a variety of reasons, but I have a soft spot for them, especially as they are genetically half of the Kleffman apple Nell and I grew.
Here is a Keepsake. One of the McGreggor’s favorite apples. Honestly, I have never eaten one fresh. Have had a few that had been in cold storage all winter and they were fine then. Looking forward to trying one fresh off of a tree.
Just some shots of Pike looking cute.
I started work on the hop trellis.
Patti kept saying that I was going to fall and kill myself. Didn’t happen.
All I did was haul old well pipe up to fix baling twine to for the vines to climb.
Of course I forgot baling twine, but will bring that up next time.
This is an apple set on one of the ancient apple trees on the property. No idea what kind of apples, but even if just a crab it is nice to see it set fruit. Last year, without being pruned, it did not have any.
Patti’s sister brought cheese. And wine.
This is Phoebe watching her mom and aunt Cindy after they have had a lot of cheese and wine. It was a good time.
Claire finally climbed as high up the windmill as you can. That is a half moon in the background.
Sunday morning, Violet is just cute, so had to snap the picture.
We brought two more rolls of cement remesh. Made 20 more cages. That is 50 (hopefully) deer proof cages.
Nell took the camera, perhaps to prevent me from taking more photographs of her. It was nice that she just documented everyone and their surroundings.
Patti figured this out for moving the cages. Much easier than rolling them.
There is one picture with Nell in it. Phoebe took the shot. I weed-whipped around every tree, shrub, and rhubarb crown. Took a few tanks of gas, but was nice to get done.
My beautiful wife. 
Just wanted to show how high we are starting the canopies on the trees to prevent deer damage when they are older. We are stripping off all of the lower foliage, promoting branch growth at levels over what the deer can easily reach.
And that is what it looks like, weed-whipped and with a cage around it.
The flags are just so that when the local farmer comes to hay things, he is not running into the cages which in twilight kind of fade from focus.
We did get chased off of the property by a storm Sunday afternoon, but got everything packed up before it got wet.
What you cannot really see in the pictures, is that while the temperatures were in the mid 90s with high humidity down in the Twin Cities, where we were, the high temperature was 73, low at night was in the 50s, and it was heaven. Well, maybe you can see the heaven. No cooked asphalt and sewer smell. No sound of cars, sirens, and airplanes. The frogs sang all night. Coyotes yipped, wolves howled, and whip-or-wills called to each other in the dusk. I started missing it as soon as we pulled out of the driveway.
