Trees and Tractors and Scapes

Since today was partly sunny and more importantly, not raining, I set to working on the five-in-one European plum tree I planted earlier this year.  The problem I needed to address was that the branches are all very close together, and mostly heading up at something like a 76-degree angle.  I wanted the branches to spread out a bit more, and preferably to be at a 45- to 60-degree angle, as they'll set significantly more fruit that way.  But how to go about this task without spending a lot of money on branch spreaders?

Why, take inspiration from what I've done with the cherry tree, and use up most of the rest of the clothespins that Jazzy keeps attaching to the kitchen drawers!  I chained them into branch spreaders:

And I took twine and some of those rocks I've dug up from the ground, and used those to make branch weights:

We also worked some more on the chicken tractor today!  (The roof bits got added on when my parents and sister were here for dinner on Friday.  Having a couple more sets of hands to hold everything in place made the angled bits go together much more easily.)

We also learned that the chickens are indeed flight capable at this point when one fluttered up onto the side of their box while I had the mesh off.  Fortunately that was as far as she went!

And, finally, I had ordered garlic scapes from the co-op this last week:

I was expecting them to have a mild garlic taste, like garlic greens do.

They do NOT.

So, since they pretty much taste like raw cloves of garlic, I tossed a few into the blender while I made salsa yesterday. ^_^