Getting rolled under this one even as I post.

Tonight I went for a short lap around the yard, and in less than five minutes this is what I saw:

“Pat Austin” rose still blooming like crazy

“Black Beauty” Elderberry also putting on a show

Persimmon planted last year, blooming and setting fruit

Cherries! Too high to pick from the ground—enjoyed by birds, not me.

“Celeste” fig, which I thought died of winter cold, is actually regrowing!

Peaches on the recently lopped peach tree

I closed up the bluebird box just yesterday, and since then Mr. Bluebird has been busy with Home Construction 2.0.

Inherited grapevine…a gigantic mess that I finally chopped to the ground this spring. I hope to train a new central vine from this sprout. I worked today to pull out, by hand, the poison ivy surrounding this vine. I await repercussions.

Unmowed hayfied reverting back to wild pasture. It’s so pretty like this—even full of berries and all—that I wonder why mow at all?

Inherited iris growing in the drainage ditch by the road.

And finally, two eggs a day appearing, as if by magic, from the guineas. I have it on good authority from egg-eating family members that they are delicious!

Remember that game?

The farm has been blanketed with buttercups. A quick online search reveals they’re considered weeds of the first order, unpalatable to livestock, and indicators of poor soil fertility. But they’re just so pretty that I can’t even hate them.

of watching the full moon rise over Buck Mountain.

The maple leaves are budding out, coating everything with insidious yellow pollen—which is fitting, as April brings the first full moon of spring.

One name for April’s full moon is the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, which is also appropriate as it coincided with the first of the season’s mowing here on the farm. The dark, clean and dry days of winter, with their hibernating around the woodstove, are over. Bring on the weed whacker, the grass-flecked pants, the ticks, the heat, the sweat, the life. Full steam ahead toward my favorite season.

I took delivery of 10 yards of mulch from my mulch and compost purveyor, a 50-something man who was born and raised about 20 minutes from my farm. He wears Carhartt overalls, a camo baseball cap, and spends all day wheeling and dealing mulch and compost from his cellphone. He is unfailingly polite and helpful to everyone who calls, which I know not only from my own calls to him, but also from overhearing him speak to his other clients on the phone while at my place.

He backed his dump truck into the pasture and dumped my mulch. And then we got to talking. He noticed the garden space I just prepared, and noted that the soil looked good. He pointed out the broom straw in my field and told me I needed lime. We shot the breeze about our shared middle schools and the recent wind-fueled wildfires down the road. He walked over to the guinea coop and peeked in, talking to the birds. He noticed the old oak tree near the well house and that it had been topped by a previous owner of this property. Which led us into a discussion of trees. He looked into my woods, said, “Let’s take a walk,” and shut off his truck.

We scrambled around the woodline, and he pointed out all the different trees that grew there. “I used to work for the forest service,” he told me, as he spied an old cherry tree growing amongst a group of “Paradise Trees,” which he said I should cut for fuel because “they’re good for nothing else.”

When he found the big old white oaks further in the woods he stood still, calculating in his head. Finally he spoke. “Now don’t go cutting these just yet. Save these for the future, for when you need a little bit of money.”

It took me a minute to process what he’d meant. A little bit of money?

“I bet you’d get a tractor trailer load of lumber out of these woods,” he said.

It all became clear. He was looking at my woods as a cash crop, something I’d never considered as I’d tiptoed beneath these beautiful old trees, willing them to withstand wind storms and time.

“Well, I kind of would just like to leave them as they are,” I said.

He considered that idea, head cocked to the side. “You never know,” was all he replied. Then he told me a story of a huge old cherry tree, “growing up in the hollow,” that he’d kept tabs on for most of his life and how the minute the property it was standing on was sold, the tree was cut for lumber.

We walked out of the woods and he pointed out scars on the oaks I’d never noticed where an old wire fence had been subsumed by bark. That’s too bad, he said, noting that the embedded wire lost me several board feet of timber.

Our talk turned to the future as he advised me to go back in my woods and dig up any little beech trees or dogwoods I could find to transplant around my house. He looked me up and down. “Not higher than your waist,” he said. “Any bigger and they won’t take.”

Then he shook my hand, climbed back in his dump truck, and drove away.

Saturday’s storm brought this old dead tree down, right across the path I use to get to the creek. I’d had my eye on this tree for a while, weighing its potential benefit as firewood versus woodpecker habitat. But the storm made the decision for me and now the tree, which is severely decomposed inside, is mushroom fodder.

We had torrential rains Saturday from the storm system that left dozens of people dead in the midwest and southeast. With tornado and flash flood and thunderstorm warnings it rained steadily all day, interspersed with howling storms. Around nine Sunday morning I headed into the woods for what’s become a customary romp with Tucker to find this, a creek where I’ve never seen one before in the two years I’ve known this land.

A swale coming out of the pasture was so full of water it was actually flowing, racing down the precipitous hillside on its way to join the creek at the bottom. It was amazing to see what I normally view as forest floor become a beautiful aquatic world.

I couldn’t resist heading further into the woods to check out the real creek, the one that’s always there. I figured that if the storms were strong enough to create creeks where none had been in a long while, serious stuff must have happened below. And I was right. The little creek that’s normally a demure trickle resembled a small river. And I would have loved to have seen it in the height of the storm…I happened along more than twelve hours after the storms were over, and I could see that the creek had flooded its banks almost twenty feet on either side. It was truly remarkable to see the change in the landscape. The woods that had become familiar was now unrecognizable. The creek was muddy and churning fast.

I went back to the creek about twelve hours later, after sunset, and found it still high and muddy, though it wasn’t rushing as violently as this morning.

And even 24 hours after the last storm, the pop up creek still ran through the woods.

Last night. This is the second hailstorm in less than two weeks.

It was two years ago that I first laid eyes on what was to become Bonafide Farm. I was living in Northern Virginia, working in D.C., and actively scouting all real estate between there and Charlottesville. My parents discovered this property, for sale by owner, on one of their drives. They sent a couple of photos, and I wrote it off until the next time I was down for a visit. Then my mom and I took a drive. It was raining, and I was taking photos from the passenger’s seat of her car as we slowly passed by.

The house was nothing to write home about, but I liked the setting…the way the house sat proud and high surrounded by its fields and trees and mountains.

That night, I called the number on the for sale sign. Fast forward two years and I am sitting in a beautiful almost year old house that looks like it’s always been here, windows open, smelling daffodils and woodsmoke from last night’s fire, bacon from this morning’s breakfast. I’ve eradicated the honeysuckle that was suffocating the quince in the photo above, and replaced the mailbox, and added many young trees. My kitty is in the open window, listening to the birds singing their evensong. What a two years it’s been, but I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be right now.