lilacs

Front Yard Clean Up – by the gate

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Today was another awesome day of clean up in the yard.  It is looking so great!

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I so missed this kind of work!  I love it so much.  There’s the feeling of accomplishment, and at the end of the day, when the body is sore and achy, and I’m tired – it’s a good tired.  You know what I mean?

Oh, and I also got some great news today.  I got an email from the electrician.  The new pole to replace the one the movers broke will be delivered in the next couple of days.  Whoot!

Meanwhile…

While the girls started on the HUGE job of raking between the trees I cleared out yesterday, and adding them to the flower garden, I started working on the south yard.  I figure, it’s about time I did some work on the parts of the yard people see when they come to our place, rather than the parts hidden away behind houses. ;-)

The first section I worked on was West of the people gate.  This is where there was a mass of dead plants that turned out to have a wire fence in it – and a bottomless glass bowl. :-D

Here is what it looked like, before.

Tree tire is tired and broken.

This is how it looks now!

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Cutting away those vines – both the old, dead ones, and the new ones that had started to grow – was a huge job, all on its own.  The mass was so thick, it was hard to find what I needed to cut with the pruning shears (those anvil shears (affiliate link) are amazing!).

Then, after getting the big stuff off, I had to go back and find more vine roots and clip them.  They spread through their roots, so there was a lot of pulling up.

I like vines.  I really do.  But my goodness, they are invasive!!

That done, I moved on to the lilacs section.

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This is how it looked after I first started working on it.  There was a lot of clipping and pulling out of vines, cutting away dead and dying branches, and figuring out what lilac stems were keepers, and what had to go.

Lilacs also spread through their roots, and can become invasive, if they’re not kept in check.  Except when they’re being choked out by vines.  :-/

As I worked my way to the far end, I found…

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… Seriously?

The biggest lilac bush at the end of the row was growing straight out of a pile of horse droppings.

I’m getting really tired of finding horse droppings all over the place.

Here are the after photos!

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This is from the West end of the lilac row, after trimming and raking.

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And here’s how it now looks from the East end.

With all the vines I pulled out of there, I think I just extended the life of these lilacs by quite a few years!  Well.  As long as we keep on top of cutting back the vines as they try and grow back, that is.

I’m pretty sure my mother had flowers planted in here, too, but they don’t seem to have survived the vines.  I don’t have any plans to plant anything here this year, but we’ll see what we decide to do with the area next year.

Next post; cleaning up my mother’s… shrine?

The Re-Farmer

It’s Raining! Also, we need another wood pile.

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This is so awesome!

We’ve got a real, honest to goodness RAIN happening right now!

We recently got more weather alerts, this time for thunderstorms, for the south and east areas of the province.  The usual warnings about possible hail, etc.  These storms tend to pass us by, where we are.  I remember talking to my dad on the phone and asking about storms I was hearing about, and he’s say, no, nothing over here.

I did just hear a rolling of thunder as I wrote that last sentence.  Oh, it is so wonderful to see the rain!

So here are some pictures from yesterday.

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More was added after this picture was taken, but it still wasn’t enough to cover the entire flower garden.

There are plenty of leaves to rake up that can be added.  The maple grove has lots.  Unfortunately, it’s such a mess, we can’t actually do any raking.

I started cleaning up around the area closest to the flower garden.  Just around a lilac bush and a maple tree.

Most of the lilac bush was dead.  Even with the living branches, I still trimmed away deadwood.  Thankfully, I’d found some anvil pruners, which made the job easier.  At least until those break, too. :-/

I also cut away most of suckers at the base of the maple tree, taking out dead branches that had fallen – including one that had fallen right into the lilac bush – and as much as I could reach of those that hadn’t fallen yet.  These suckers have had years of growth, so a saw was needed.  The space needed to saw them meant I wasn’t trimming them as close to the trunk as I should be. :-/

(Darn.  Sounds like the rain has already stopped.  I hope more comes, later!)

This is what’s left of the lilac bush.

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I took about about 3 or 4 dead trunks, along with lots of dead suckers, and trimming the excess.  I love lilacs, but they do have a spreading habit, so there was quite a bit to trim at ground level, spreading towards the maple.

I moved the old wash basin, once it was clear enough.  There’s a maple stump on the left that it used to be sitting on, as a planter (I had to cut away maple suckers from the stump, too!).  I considered turning it right side up, but that cats like to sit on it. :-D

Now there’s just the pile of soil from inside the basin to clean up.  I might put the basin upside down over the stump, just for the cats. :-D

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The base of the maple tree is mostly clear; there are still suckers to cut on the other side of the trunk.

It’s amazing how much difference, just this little bit of cleaning did.  For one thing, there is no longer dead branches hanging over what used to be an open path.

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This is what I cleaned out.

We need to start another wood pile.  The dead stuff can go where we are currently piling wood, but the green stuff needs to be set aside to dry, to be fuel for the fire pit next year. :-)

You can kind of see what it looked like before; the following picture was taken from the garden side, and you can see the wash basin planter and the stump it had been on.

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In between working on the open areas of the yard itself (that weed trimmer is sure going to pay for itself, over and over!), we will continue to clean up in the maple grove, and continue to layer the leaves we rake up onto the flower garden.

That will take a few months.

:-)

I also moved this…

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A strange place for a bird feeder stand.  It is now in the end of the flower garden outside the living room window.  We’ll look into finding some way to anchor it, since that area is more exposed to winds.  Between this and the bird bath I want to move over there, we should soon have a nice little sanctuary outside our living room window. :-)

The Re-Farmer

We… don’t have rain. :-(

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So much for weather forecasts.

For all the lower temperatures and overcast skies, and forecasts of 80% chance for rain, there has been none today.  Going into town with another errand, my daughter and I played a bit of Pokemon Go.  In the game, which is linked to local weather in some way, showed pouring rain on our maps.  In the real world, there wasn’t a drop.

Once home again, I did a quick check around the yard and garden area.  After talking to my mother yesterday, I learned that the trees in the flower garden are not cherry trees, after all, but ornamental apple trees.  The cherry trees, she tells me, are in the spruce grove, behind where the wood pile used to be.  No sign of blossoms there, yet.  I am not sure why edible cherries would be planted among spruce trees, while ornamental (I assume that means they don’t produce anything edible) apples are planted next to the house.

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The apple trees in the flower garden are leafing and budding up nicely, too.  The row of apples (all varieties of crab apples, as I recall) are barely in leaf.

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Planted on the north side of the spruce grove, they wouldn’t have anywhere near as much sun as the ones in the flower garden, which is the most likely reason why they are so much slower to revive for the season.

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On the far side of the garden, along the fence line, the lilac border is showing flower buds already on some bushes.  I was looking for a sign of the chokecherry tree that used to be there.  The lilac border runs the entire length of the fence line now, but when I was a child, it was only about half the distance, and the chokecherry tree was at the end of the row, about the middle of the length of the garden at the time.  I may have found it, but can’t be sure, as it’s behind lilac bushes.  The tree I saw that might be it also seems to be dead; likely the chokecherry tree was choked out by the lilacs. :-(  I will see if I can confirm that with my mother one of these days.

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This is part of a row of what appears to be raspberry canes, though it’s hard to identify them among the scrub and without any leaf buds to be seen.  On one side, it’s almost right up against a row of spruces.  On the other, I can see that it was plowed within inches of the stems.  They would be getting light only in the early hours of the morning, now that the sun is rising so much farther to the north than it did in the winter.  By about 9 or 10 am, they would be in shade until sunrise.  We’ll see what raspberries we get this year, if any.  Most varieties of raspberries have canes that produce in the second year, before dying back.  At that point, the spent canes should be cut away, but that is something my parents never did, as far as I can recall; they just let them be until it was decided to transplant them.  I remember when they were planted on the far side of the garden, beyond where a row of trees is now planted.  At the height of raspberry season, we could pick several ice cream pails’ worth of berries in the morning, then come back by evening and have more ripened berries to pick.  On our list of things we eventually want to plant are three different varieties of raspberries, each with a different harvesting period, so we could have raspberries from July through September.

Whenever that happens, we will be sure to plant them somewhere that actually gets full sun.

The Re-Farmer