April has arrived with its rain and its mud. March is just a memory. The ice is gone on the pond out front, four days later than last year.

I do love the rain. Puddles are a great invention—dirt roads are made for them, and streams were designed to play in. Streams in spring are totally where it’s at. Some of the happiest days of my life were playing civil engineer in the streams of Massachusetts, California and Maine. The more water the better. The best thing about spring streams in northern California was that you could do advanced dam construction in bare feet. Bare feet on April 3 in central Maine is still mostly an indoor thing unless you’re a farm apprentice, then all shoe’s are off. Still, it won’t be long.

This morning’s rain was a thick mist that wasn’t necessarily coming down or going up. It just filled the air and collected on any surface it could find. It beaded up into small pearls that lined the branches of the peach tree outside the kitchen window. Later the rain came in a more recognizable form.

We continued bench grafting in the shop for the second day. Cammy and I were joined by Todd, Skylar and Evacilie. It was a propagation party. This year we grafted a few dozen selections—mostly apples but also pears and plums. Some varieties are new to us and will go on trial up at Finley Lane. In other cases we grafted duplicates of trees that deserve to have a back-up, just in case.

We cranked up the old wood stove in the shop, sharpened the knives and sorted through the bags of scionwood and rootstock. It’s an annual ritual that takes place the first week of April. With the “mistifying” weather and temps that hovered near 32, it couldn’t have been a more perfect day to carve up twigs and make trees.