First Day of Spring

A day of firsts... First day of Spring and first planting at the new house. We spent most of the weekend doing spring cleanup at the current place so we can get it sold, but I did make some time this afternoon to get over and turn over a little bit of earth. Nothing major. Planted some primroses in pots near the door and transplanted some mums that used to be in the front window boxes. I was actually surprised that they made it through the winter, but they were greening up. Unfortunately they didn't look nice enough to stay, so I dug them up and moved them over to the little triangle by the back door. Not sure if they will make it, but mums are pretty hardy, so we'll see!

Transplanted mums and some primroses for color.

Read More

Where's Waldo

Where's Waldo?

Some of our neighborhood wildlife seems to like to hang out at the pool.... In this photo... A black cat and a groundhog. I promise.

Here's a better shot of one of the critters:

Temporary Resident

Read More

Mysteries of Spring

One of the most exciting things about moving to the new house is just the grand mystery of what may already be part of the landscape and is just currently tucked away, hidden, just waiting for the right time to pop up and make an appearance. Some things like these naturalized crocuses are a welcome sight:

Even more crocuses make an appearance.

It's hard to tell in the photo, but they have pretty much covered a huge area of the back yard with living blanket of white. There are other signs of life too. In the one and only raised bed where it appears that someone at sometime did some gardening, there are tell-tell signs of more bulbs on the way:

Bulbs of some sort starting to poke through.

I hope to use this bed for my tomatoes this year, but for now at least something beautiful seems to be emerging from the tangled mess of bamboo and weeds! I'll take it!

 For every pleasant surprise there are bound to be a few not so great surprises lurking out there:

Gutter Tree

 Trees growing in the gutters for instance. I spent an hour out in the rain up on a ladder trying to do my best to clear out two or more years of debris so that some of the torrential rain would have a way to get off the roof without creating more damage. On the west side of the front porch I found this little 4' tall sapling growing quite happily from the gutter. Needless to say it had to go!

This weekend brought heavy rains,  which in addition to being a good way to see how the land drains and where water pools for future planning purposes, also served as a reminder of why exactly we had to buy flood insurance.

This is a shot late this afternoon of the RAGING river that used to be our little trickle of a creek. It's about 7 feet to the bottom of the bridge. Normally there's about 6" of water running through. It's been raining all day, and I wouldn't be surprised if the water made it up to the bottom of the bridge before all is said and done. On a positive note, it seems to be handling things ok, and we'd still have to have another 3 feet or so before it would be out into the yard. 

Read More