WE are sore…
Owie.
But it had to be done. One thing about a garden—if something isn’t working, it needs to move. And that spruce was getting too big for the corner spot.
WE are sore…
Owie.
But it had to be done. One thing about a garden—if something isn’t working, it needs to move. And that spruce was getting too big for the corner spot.
did you have to dig up the spruce?
Not the 8 foot tall one. The two foot tall bush at the corner by the fire hydrant. That was going to obstruct view at the intersection: it was making a compact ball—larger and larger—instead of spreading low. So it had to move. The rose bush was simply to make a place for it.
But Jane is so tired she’s nearly ill from the exertion. We could both drag it, but she’d lifted it into the wheelbarrow, and this gaggle of men stood across the street (yard sale) and did absolutely nada to help out. The ‘me’ generation in full flower. Arrgh. I was meanwhile working in the back and didn’t see what was going on until I finished up and came round front.
Please, nandiin, take some rest! You may have to knock Jane down and sit on her to do so, from the sound of it.
Sympathies! Moving trees is not an easy thing, ever! But the urge to get outside and do stuff can’t be ignored when spring springs!
I did much the same thing on Thursday, cleaned and moved an area that had been driving me crazy and managed to make myself so sore and tired that I couldn’t eat. My brain insists it is living in a body half my age!
Take it easy on yourselves. Please??!!!
Happy Equinox…..or Oestra!
Some cleaning, but the main issue right now is preparing for a big yard sale on Good Friday. I’m going in with a friend who has a storage unit full of craft supplies she never intends to use, whereas I have more home improvement stuff and just weird junk. I am aiming to get the ‘captain’s cabin’, a.k.a. the smallest of our spare rooms, mostly cleared of a decade’s accumulation; that and the water heater/tool room and the extra bathroom. If you need the spare toilet, you must step around old louvers and an air compressor!
I thought Jane’s back was only just recovering, and she’s already digging up trees again and lugging them around. She doesn’t appear to know how to take care of herself and ask for help when appropriate – much too self-sufficient and stubborn, is our Jane! 😉
Please take good care of her, and of yourself, for the next bit of time.
I did my attic last weekend, clearing out accumulated junk and sorting stuff into crates and cupboards. The room is usable again; I took a carload to the dump and got the recycling store to pick up a table, bench, 4 chairs, 3 lamps and assorted bags of smaller stuff. The point is: the neighbor lady helped me tackle my attic!
In return I help her with babysitting and when she needs a hand. Everybody gets the spring-cleaning urge, either in the house or the garden, and some help is often useful, so it all evens out in the end. But it all starts by indicating that some help would be welcome. If no-one says anything, no reciprocal assistance network gets off the ground. Maybe if you’d asked those people across the street they’d have given their help without demur, and welcome to you.
Or am I being an unrealistic idealist when I think that, and an old-fashioned prosy bore besides, for saying it? I don’t know your street, your neighbors, or the way people around there normally interact so I probably really should keep my mouth shut… sorry!
I hope the anti-allergy stuff works, you can get some rest, and you both feel better soon.
Hmm. When I get the spring cleaning urge, I tend to lie down until it goes away.
That seems to work for me, as well.
As far as I’m concerned, for the most part dust is like a sleeping dog.
YOu just cannot get people to do ‘gardening’ as opposed to showing up with a lawnmower and edger and collecting way too much money for racing around the yard and blowing the grass out of the street. THe notion of sitting down and digging out a tree and replanting it, oh, no, they don’t do that. They don’t weed gardens. THey don’t know a zinnia from a primrose—or either of those from a weed.
Jane’s talking about getting a load of bark in and that will be a lot of shoveling and hauling. YOu can’t go down and hire people off the street—serial axe murderers need work too. I’ve never hired any independent labor that wasn’t one card short of a full deck, at very least. Or that wouldn’t come to you for ‘a loan’ or just ‘I need to get my truck out of the shop. Can you give me thirty?” And you don’t know but what they’re nuts.
Those people in the church near by don’t have any able bodied offspring or people willing to lend a hand for a donation to a charity of choice?
I look out on my little, sodden, enclosed patio and garden and despair. I’ve got to get out there and do stuff soon, the clematis is budding.
And something has torn up my moss again. (The greater Vancouver area has been invaded by European chafer beetle larvae, which damage grass roots, but raccoons, skunks and crows tear up the entire lawn in pursuit of the grubs. It can look roto-tilled.) I do not have lawn over nice soil and chafer grubs; I have moss over granite chips, landscape cloth, cedar needles and clay, but that didn’t stop a racoon from peeling up the moss in hope. After he condescended to leave, I patted the moss back down, but I see something has ripped it up again. With all the rain we get, I don’t think you can actually kill moss, but if I wanted a single-colour green jigsaw puzzle to continually assemble, I’d look into a cardboard one that could be done indoors.
Raccoons. Try black pepper, Havaheart black pepper. But then again—do you want the grubs?
What ticked me –and the raccoon– off is I don’t have grubs. They live in lawns and some root crops. I don’t have grass at all, just moss over rocks. So the varmint did all that work for nothing. The last assault on the moss was probably a crow, as the damage wasn’t as severe. Crows know when to cut their losses and quit. (Also they pull greenery out in little tufts rather than rolling in up in sheets like the bigger varmints).
Spring has arrived astonishingly early in southern Wisconsin, and I’ve been hankering to start playing in the dirt. That said, a nice spring snowstorm is due to arrive on Wednesday/Thursday, but will likely melt completely before the weekend is over.
With work and family responsibilities, I won’t be able to do much in the garden until mid-May, so I’m doing a lot of planning (i.e., dreaming about something that will take a lot more time, energy, and money than I’ll have this year). The planning is fun, though! My biggest dream is to put in and plant an asparagus bed (in a sunny spot away from the black walnuts). If I succeed, we’ll be feasting on a few home-grown spears in a little more than 3 years. I’m dreaming of growing some other vegetables for us, too. And, I’m thinking of all the garlic mustard that we’ll be pulling (and pulling) for many years to come!
Our yard seems to be supporting a large population of moles or some other small critters that tunnel parallel to the surface of the yard, but only a few inches down. The skunks (and maybe fox and coyotes) have been digging holes into those tunnels in the hope of finding something tasty. The result: the yard looks like tiny versions of the monsters from “Tremors” have been remarkably busy. After living in a condo for many years, where a good part of the annual budget was spent/wasted on “maintaining a lovely lawn”, we’re enjoying the chemical-free mess. The critters leave the trees, shrubs, and our fenced-in garden alone, so are welcome to the rest of the yard.
Thanks to some young folks who are handy with chain saws, we’ve started to remove some of the many, many black walnut trees (volunteers from around the time the house was constructed, I think) that have been shading and secreting juglone to hamper other plants. Black walnuts make up more than 50% of our trees, and the understory biodiversity is suffering because of them. A few of the black walnuts that are close to the house are not very healthy or have shallow roots, so their removal will lessen the risk of damage to the house during storms.
The trees are too small to interest anyone other than a hobbyist woodworker, but a friend will want the larger pieces. Black walnut is a beautiful wood! The remainder will be added to our brush piles which protect rabbits and woodchuck burrows.
We will plant other native, juglone-tolerant plants that provide food and shelter for wildlife. Very young trees and shrubs (bare root, when possible) are not very pricy, and they suffer less from transplant shock. It’ll take about 25 years (we might well have left this mortal coil by then), but we hope our yard will help to support many more species than it currently does.
The replacement plants will selected for their hardiness and ability to tolerate the likely hotter and drier conditions that will prevail in another 25 years.
Some areas will remain relatively tree-free, so that we can put in milkweed and other flowering plants for monarchs, other butterflies and moths, bees, and hummingbirds. Our gradual replacement of lawn grass with other plants will also take many years.
I have plenty of experience with moles and gophers, if you need advice, e.g. how to tell them apart by the mounds they make.
I should add that we’ll let the other, smaller walnut logs dry out until autumn, when they’ll go to someone who uses wood for heat.
Our plumerias could stand a good pruning. Despite being trees (or maybe large shrubs deluding themselves), they have gotten spindly, with long weak branches that only support a tuft of leaves and sometimes blossoms at the very end. The gent who usually trims our palm trees offered to do the plumerias as well. He did a good job removing the persistent stumps of the volunteer ficuses that were taking over the hedge, but we were hit with an unexpectedly large bill at the end, and he discovered the rocks embedded in the stumps with his chainsaw; I did warn him. Buying a pole saw/chainsaw on a stick might be less expensive.
I am mostly prepped for the yard sale, so wish me luck!
Luck!