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Early Spring Chores

    We’ve had unusual weather for March lately.

    Like 70 degrees.

    And 75 degrees.

    In March.

    In Maine.

    And we’re loving every minute of it.

    Today I started pruning our raspberries. I read somewhere that the conventional time to prune raspberries is just after the harvest or in the middle of winter.

    But I’m not always very conventional.

    So I wait to prune the raspberries until nice weather hits in the spring. And today was the day. One of the nice things about waiting until the weather breaks to prune the raspberries is that nature has done much of the work for me. If I pruned them just after the harvest (which I don’t do because I’m too busy preserving those yummy raspberries among other things), then the canes that should be pruned are still very green. Which means they’re even harder to cut back. And if I tried to prune them mid-winter, well, most winters we have a few feet of snow on the ground. So trudging through it on my snowshoes to uncover raspberry canes that need to be pruned isn’t exactly on my winter To Do list.

    By saving the pruning chore until the first break in the weather, the canes that need to be cut are dead. They produced fruit last year, and they aren’t needed any longer. The bark is peeling (which means less prickly thorns in my fingers) and they’re cut off pretty easily. And I get the bonus of being outside. In the sun. Working. And if I’m outside working, then someone else needs to help out with inside things. Unless everyone else is outside working too.

    Except for those nasty thorns that are still stuck in my fingers,   I really enjoy the process. But don’t tell my family that. Because then I don’t get to play the “I’m working” card and I lose out on the sympathy inside work that they do for me.