Tag Archive | personal: outdoors

Weekend Blog with Yard-Work and procrastination…

Saturday morning, before the weather broke, my husband and I spent probably a half-hour cleaning out our culvert, digging wet leaves and sticks out of the ditch and hauling them to the hedgerow.

It’s achey work, bending-over, digging, lifting, wet work, and at least the weather was still in the fifties. It was necessary work, because in a heavy rain, our culvert fills all the way to the top, and, clogged as it was, it might have overflowed in unfortunate ways. It’s supposed to carry rain away, not keep it in our yard, after all.

There was the nice feeling of having done something physical that was productive was nice, that warm ache. But on the other hand…

So, I hate raking. I really, really hate raking. It goes back to being a child, and I am ridiculous about any number of chores that I had to do as a kid/teenager — but raking really ranks up there.

And we didn’t rake this fall.

And the leaves all blew, like they will, into the culvert.

You see where I’m going?

It reminded me of learning, maybe seven years ago, exactly how bad it could be when Iavoided conflict by not talking about problems or by trying to give in to everyone at once (Answer: everyone ends up mad at you and you end up with even more conflict than you’d originally been trying to avoid).

It’s one of those lessons I have to keep learning over and over again: the more you put something off, the more work it is.

Hopefully, I remember this in fall, when it’s time to rake again. Or the next time something threatens to pile up in my metaphorical culverts.

…kind of like the dishes in the sink…

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Spring Is Here

May13

Spring is Here.

And we will have apples this Autumn!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/533157.html. You can comment here or there.

Rock Gardens.

May9

I’ve been thinking about rock gardens.

I even have a Pinterest board of rock gardens.

See, our property has a lot of rocks. It’s got so many rocks, it’s sort of like someone dumped a thin layer of topsoil over a gravel quarry.

(Someone did. The glaciers. We’re at the bottom of the Finger Lakes, which means we’re the dumping ground for a lot of Canadian rock. Anyone want their rock back?)

So as we do anything in the yard… we pull out rocks. Big rocks, little rocks. Tiny rocks and huge rocks.

We’ve started covering up a pretty horrid border garden to the west side of the house with large flat rocks, tucking Coleus plants in between the rocks. It’s looking decent so far; will look better once we get down more weedcloth.

But we have this wet sunken corner of the yard… and I’m thinking more rocks. Rocks, and a little water feature. Maybe a waterfall.

What do you think?

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Using what we have

May13

We have, right now, a lawn service for mowing (cheaper in the short run then buying a mower, and we have a rather large yard). We also had a delay in getting them to mow this spring, so we then had a need to rake because our lawn was drowning under the cuttings.

We have, also, a small garlic garden by the loading dock (doesn’t everyone have a loading dock?) which T. planted from Chinese-food-store garlic last autumn. The garlic is doing very well, but it was getting a bit choked with weeds. It needed mulching.

A=B = garlic bed mulched with grass cuttings. Using what we have. I love it.

This weekend, I also planted some alyssums, a bay tree, and a lavender plant in pots on my patio. And I finished planting the butternuts. Meanwhile, T. raked grass and played with his new sickle, knocking down weeds the mowing service didn’t get to.

We still have a double handful of plants to put in the ground that we bought this weekend: we gave capriox our little play house for her goats, so we’re going to plant the resultant square of dirt with raspberries, pansies, groundcover, and alyssums.

Having a yard is a lot of fun!

Unrelated: I am going to have reason to send a bunch of letters/postcards soon. I am looking for small-business greeting cards that are pretty and $5/less a card. Want to sell me some? Know someone I should look at? Drop me a line.

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Life in the Country, Tuesday edition (Actually Monday edition, just really late).

Mar21

From jjhunter‘s awesome How are You? (in Haiku) post from yesterday (which you should totally read):

My cat, very proud
And very loud, this morning,
presented a mouse.

3 or 4 a.m., to be specific, with the mouse so far up his mouth he was making a weird warbling noise. Good kitty. For a certain value of good.

This is the second mouse Drake has ever caught, and he responded in about the same fashion last time.

Now, I’m not known for being squeamish – except about dead things. So T had to get the mouse away from the cat/out of his mouth and dispose of it. We gave the kitty treats and told him he was a good cat.

Ah, life in an old farmhouse.

In other news, the crocuses and daffodils are up, my chives and garlic are happy, and there’s buds on the lilac. Yay Spring! (I grew up in Lake Effect, NY. Any day over 60 before the end of April is a blessing to be enjoyed to its fullest before it snows again!)

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