Memorial Day weekend was a good one here; lots of yard maintenance bordered by picnics and time spent with friends around the campfire.
We practically live outdoors at this point in the springtime, I have done a few indoor projects that I’ve been meaning to write about on here, but in general, life is all outside, all the time. Thank god the baby is old enough to be entertained watching us work, squealing with happiness as we sing aloud and talk to her about the tools she’s going to be encouraged to use someday, we’re actually getting things done at home again. That’s the rototiller! You’re going to LOVE using this, almost as much as you’re going to like the leaf blower, and hey, stop ripping off your ear protection! Important learnings.
The front 10-feet of our yard has been covered by leaves since last fall, which in hindsight we totally should have cleared within a day of having blown them there because leaves are messy and kill grass and blah blah, it’s really a shame that the mega powerful leaf blower I bought doesn’t also suck and mulch; neither of us had the energy to clear them last fall in between days spent installing our maple floors and, well, birth-related things. After the longest winter of our lives and with just enough Mike’s Hard Lemonade for liquid motivation, we spent an afternoon this weekend clearing those leaves in another one of those backyard crossfit challenges. And for what it’s worth, we thought it would take 4-5 tarp loads and 30-minutes, until we realized that the leaves were packed a foot deep in some places, and wet, so it took more like 20 trips dragging tarps from the curb into the deep of the back woods.
One of the bigger discoveries during this mass cleanup is that there is actually a big sewer drain in front of our house, with side drainage and everything! Not only was it covered by leaves, but with broken asphalt and soil, so it had been completely invisible until now, not doing a bit to help with our street’s drainage (and not even something we noticed while we mowed the yard every week last summer). We’re sorta sticklers for keeping drains clear, it goes right up there with shoveling snow from around the fire hydrant, and changing the smoke detector batteries, engrained in the brain cavity that’s instinctively concerned about avoiding preventable disasters. It gets better too, Pete discovered and cleared 4 more drains that were covered when he paced off up and down our street with his pitchfork, a civic duty that I wish it could qualify us for a tax break, because holy smokes, wtf, Rochester!
O’er in the backyard, I initated what’s bound to be my never-ending project of transplanting pachysandra clumps into other parts of the yard, creating garden edging and accents that the deer are less inclined to nom on. The pachysandra migration has been driven by the appeal of the plants I edged our old deck with (you can kinda get a glimpse of it in this post); it took 3 years for those plants to go from scraggly to lush and amazing, so I’ll know I’ll need to be patient with these, but the payout will be great by year 2017.
Other projects continue on – still building our playhouse, still making necessary repairs to the barn structure, still pruning trees. Welcome back, springtime.
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