4 posts tagged “yardwork”

It's annoying enough to find yourself stirring to a bright sky and a cacophony of birds at 6am, but it's most aggravating when it wakes you in the middle of dreams where you're visiting with loved ones you only ever get to visit in dreams any more.  Though they say we only remember the dreams we are woken from, so I guess without all this early morning bright and busyness I wouldn't remember these visits I've been enjoying for the past several days.  But then, I wouldn't be starting each day with this bittersweet melancholy if I couldn't remember these dreams either.  I've heard it suggested that visitors in the dreaming usually have a preferred time for visiting, and now I'm wondering if I woke up every day at 6am how many similar dreams I'd remember.

I managed to get back to sleep yesterday, and actually got a couple of hours of sound sleep after a night of tossing and turning.  That meant a late start to the day though, which meant yard work later in the morning than I'd planned, ...which meant more intense sunlight beating down on my shoulders.  I was an idiot and didn't put on sunscreen.  I only meant to be out for about fifteen minutes, and that turned into about thirty.  And then I spent some time in the sun hanging laundry on the line yesterday too.  By the end of the day, my shoulders were a pretty good pink.  You'd think, with my fine Irish skin, I would learn to always sunscreen-up before going out, especially this close to the summer solstice.  But even now I'm thinking if I go out early enough, I won't have to put that goop all over my skin.  *sigh*  I will put it on though.  I hate it, but I know I need it.  Mean, mean sun.

So I finally got my old flower bed cleared of waist-high wild growth and filled back up with compost on Sunday.  Earlier in the season I'd planned on laying out a perennial bed and planting according to plan.  It's been so damn humid though, and it's so very unpleasant to be outside in it, once the bed was ready for planting, I just randomly sprinkled all of my flower seeds in there.   All of them.  I put in the packets I bought new this year and anything I had left from previous years, including some large packets of wildflower mixes.  It's my mystery garden now.  Tiny green bits are already peeking up.  I've very curious to see what grows.  I'm going to have to weed it *VERY* carefully as things start growing.  Fortunately, I'm quite familiar with all the weeds I just finished pulling out of the ground there, so I should be able to identify and evict those.

I've also started digging my garden for misfit plants.  I hate it when all of your seeds germinate and you have to cull the herds.  I also hate pulling plants growing where they aren't supposed to, especially when I'm curious as to what's growing.  So this year I'm clearing out the mess that used to be our blackberry brambles, and putting a misfit garden in.  I've already transplanted some stuff there.  This will be another fun experiment, seeing what survives the transplant, and what becomes of it all.  I'm pretty sure I have some pumpkin growing from pumpkin guts I composted last year.  I'm going to have to move some zucchini and cucumber over to the misfit garden this week too, as all of those seeds decided to try growing this year, and there's just not room in the veggie garden for them all.

As for the blackberry brambles, they've migrated into the tiger lilies by the garage, which is the perfect place for them, since the lilies are abundant and I won't have a weedy mess growing under painfully sharp brambles.

The tiger lillies by the kitchen window are back this year after being choked out by morning glory vines for a couple of years.  I got tired of that damn non-flowering vine choking out my lilies last year, and asked Craig to spray the vine with a topical poison.  It worked perfectly.  The vine is gone, and my cheery orange friends are back and blooming this year.

Enough yammering about my yard.  I'm going to go have a seat out there in my favorite spot and enjoy a bit of this morning, as long as I'm up, before it gets too hot and sticky out.  Don't know if I'll do more yard work today or if I'll give my shoulders the day off to fade a bit.  That would be the smart thing to do, but the siren song of progress is so hard to resist.  For the moment though, iced coffee, seed for the birds, my favorite seat and a few more minutes thinking about loved ones (much loved!) I sadly don't get to see anywhere but in dreams any more.

I spent the day outside, and what a gorgeous day!  I prepped my veggie garden for planting.  Planting is still at least a month off, but all I have to do is turn a little compost into the beds, and they're good to go.  Tomorrow I'll start the seeds that need to be started indoors, and by Memorial Day I'll be filling up the garden.

I also cut back my precious roses.  Oy.  It's been tough in previous years just to trim them a little, but this year I went all-in and cut them back proper.  I love those roses so very much.  They seem to be the soul of this house.  I know that roses are supposed to love a good seasonal cut-back, and they have responded really well to what little I've done in years past, but I'm really nervous about what I did today.  The brambles have always been scraggly and unkempt looking, and though they've bloomed with the most sweetly fragrant, bright pink tea roses, they *really* needed some serious pruning.  The roots are very well established and they've flourished even when completely neglected before we ever bought the house, so please, oh please, Goddess, let my roses continue to spread and bloom!  ...Tomorrow I do the roses on the east side of the house.  *gulp*

Still to do in the yard is to dig up my herb garden which has been self-propagating for years and needs a fresh planting.  I also need to dig up the neglected north flower bed, prep the area around the deck for planting, and dig a new sunflower bed on the west side of the yard.  All of those need some compost turned into the soil too.  The shrubs need weeding and mulching, and though the roses are half cut back, I still need to weed and clean the ground beneath them.  The blackberry brambles need to be cleaned up and weeded, a few of the new lilacs need relocating, and the compost piles themselves need to be turned.  The ivy needs to be trained up the fence and the lillies of the valley could stand to be thinned.  I'm sure there's even more to do, but that's what's on my list for the next few weeks.  With any luck, after that, it's just planting, watering, weeding and feeding.

We spent a $50 gift card we were given for Christmas almost completely on seeds today.  That was a lot of fun!  A fabulous gift too, since it gets me a new veggie garden, a new herb garden, a new perennial flower bed and some pretty potted annuals.

More than anything, even the veggies and herbs, I *REALLY* hope my roses thrive.

I should be outside cutting back my roses for the growing season, but I'm just not feeling it.  I had a busy week full of hard work, and I think I'm just going to have a quiet day of slack today.  Besides, the thing most needed in the modern, working weekday is recess, and this will give me an excuse to take a break, step away from the computer and sneak outside for a little yardwork daily during the week.  So, yeah, I'm planning smart *not* being lazy.  ;)

What does one do with blank journals?  I absolutely adore pretty journals, but I never can decide what to put in them.  A pretty journal is something worth keeping, but not much of what I write is worth keeping.  So, do I take the chance and write whatever I want at the moment in them, knowing that some day I'll probably just want to burn them, or do I continue to hold onto them waiting for that perfect purpose to come to me, knowing that it never will?

Speaking of burning, might put the fire circle to use tonight.  It's good weather for it, and I do have some old journals I want to burn (nothing pretty, just spiral notebooks), not to mention the scrap wood and bundles of twigs from the yard.  Might as well get rid of the old twigs and make room for all I'm going to cut out of my roses this week.

My *BIG* project this year is going to be to organize my photos (digital and physical) and memorabilia.  I'm having a hard time starting.  First I need to dig it out from everywhere I've stashed bits and pieces, and sort it all just to see what's there.  I need to come up with some sort of temporary sorting/storage system.  Eventually, I want everything in albums, shadow boxes, pretty storage boxes and/or maybe even a small chest of drawers, but I need to see what I have before I can decide how to best store it.  The longterm goal is to photograph or scan as much as possible and get rid of most of the physical stuff that takes up room and collects dust.  Digital stuff is so much easier to organize, and electrons take up so little space.  This is going to be a huge project though, and I'm ready to start, just intimidated.  I'm one of the world's most nostalgic and obsessively collecting packrats.  It'll be good to free up the energy in all those old, dusty boxes stashed everywhere though.  Hmm.  Maybe I'll start now.

I want to knit, but I'm between projects.  I'm very much looking forward to going to the yarn store tomorrow!

I think we're having shrimp for dinner tonight.  I know we're watching Låt den rätte komma in, which I'm REALLY excited to see!  I so wanted to see it in the theater, but Toledo is too pedestrian to have an art theater any more.  It came from Netflix in today's mail though so, YAY!

Craig got his new Kindle 2 this week.  It's much sexier than my Kindle 1, but feature-wise, there's not much there that I feel like I'm missing.  I can wait for another version or four before upgrading mine.  Still, the Kindle 2 is verra sexeh!  And I love that we have them both registered together and can share our books between either Kindle!

Yeah.  I think that's everything that was rattling around in my brain pan.  I think I'll pull out one of those dusty boxes and start sorting pictures and travel brochures now.

This is the first day this week I've functioned outside of a NyQuil coma, and I had trouble sleeping last night without, but it's good to be feeling healthy again.  Now I'm just tired. 

I spent an hour and a half raking a lot of wet leaves into piles this morning, so my arms are noodly ...and I'm even more tired.  I'm not even sure why we rake leaves and pile them up to be taken away.  What's the point?  BESIDES grass ...the grass lawn being the dumbest thing ever conceived of.  The leaves that made it into the backyard will be mulched with the mower eventually; some might be raked up and put in the compost pile, but the front yard gets raked to keep peace with the neighbors, who all rake their yards because ...?  They like grass???

Craig took a sick day yesterday so he could sleep in.  That worked about half as planned.  He slept in, but then he logged more than half a day's time doing work, so his sick day became comp time.  Once he shut his laptop off though, after our late lunch of medicinal chicken soup, we snuggled together under a blankie and played Champions of Norrath for the rest of the day.  I think it was the Playstation that cured our colds.

I wasn't up to driving around town Tuesday, so I missed art class, dammit.  Craig went though, and he came home and explained this week's lesson to me.  I still have to actually do it, but I'm glad he went because at least I know what I missed.  Next Tuesday is our last class, which bums me out.  But, we've decided that instead of buying holiday gifts for each other this year, we're signing up for the next art class!  *SQUEEEEE!*  We're both really excited about that, even though it doesn't start up until January.  I'll have lots of time to practice while I wait, I guess.  :)

Apparently, our teacher wants three works from each student to submit to the student art exhibit.  Craig tells me it's not mandatory, but that's what she's asking for.  We don't have to do anything but surrender three of our lessons from our sketchbook, and she says she'll do the necessary cropping, ...but ...those are lessons, practice!  There's nothing there that's exhibit worthy,.  There are all sorts of measuring marks and such on those drawings.  I mean, I guess of the point of the exhibit is to demonstrate what's being learned... but it just seems *REALLY* weird surrendering anything less than polished work for an exhibit.

There was more I wanted to write, I'm pretty sure, but I'm tired and my brain is mush and I can't think of anything else that's noteworthy.  I just want Craig to come home so we can have pizza, watch the shuttle launch (7:55 EST) and campaign some more.