The Downside of Spring

Very few things in life are purely good or purely bad, and that includes spring. The downside to spring, of course, is yard work. It was quite warm, bordering on hot, over the weekend, so there wasn’t much excuse to stay inside.


Mrs. Fetched decided that the entire front bed needed to be tilled up so she could re-arrange it. Figuring it would be easier to till up without the stepping stones in the way, I pried them out of the ground and stacked them off to the side. There were 25 of them all told, some of which were buried under dirt or plant-sprawl. This wisteria was hiding two, maybe three of them. I just probed around with the shovel, heard the tonk, and pried out the stone.

The hard part was when I started tilling around a couple of the butterfly bushes along the driveway: I’d forgotten those beds were graveled (easy enough to do when the gravel is covered with dirt, grass, and leaves). The Mantis about shook my arms off before I was done. We covered that area with mulch cloth and eight bags of pine bark. I also appropriated three of the stepping stones so I could cross it (on the way to Studio FARfetched) barefoot.


Brown Thrashers are Planet Georgia’s bird, which is appropriate. They get into your business, attack their reflections in car windows, and roost in inconvenient places. Like the little porch in front of the studio. They’ve been roosting there at night through the winter, and I’ve shoo’ed them away I don’t know how many times (and ducked many more times when trying to go in and they freak out). Although it was rather warm in the studio, I had stuff to do; the thrashers kept flying back & forth outside, waiting for me to leave.


Here’s one of this year’s houseguests, perched in the dogwood outside Studio FARfetched, waiting for me to get back to the yard. They’re going to love it when I replace the burned-out light bulb on the porch. I figure I’ll wait for the young to get gone, then I’ll put tack strips in the rafters. They can use one of the several bird houses we’ve put up around the manor.


The upside of spring, of course, is that I’ll be riding the motorcycle to work. Daughter Dearest is getting Cousin Splat’s parking permit, so she can drive herself to school…

Pretty weeds

One certain sign of spring at FAR Manor is that the weeds start waking up and (in some cases) offering bribes. One of the prettier weeds, the wild violets, are nearly impossible to eradicate. I even poured old kerosene on them over the winter, and they only died off temporarily. The lawn mower passes over them and leaves them pretty much unscathed.


This is what they look like up close and personal.


A few of them, for whatever reason, are more white than violet. I have no clue.


Here are some cheerful yellow flower-weeds popping up amongst the violets (and the grass).


Cutting one yellow flower-weed out of the herd.


Mrs. Fetched buys a lot of flowers and plants them in various places. She doesn’t really have to bother, but she likes bigger blossoms and putting them where she wants them. These don’t get out of the grass and are nickel- and dime-size. What do you want for free?

Yup, I jinxed It

I said winter had just gone by, and this morning and tomorrow morning are around above/below) freezing.

Stay warm, wherever you are.

When is beach grass not beach grass?

Answer: when there’s no beach. Then I guess it’s broom grass. Mrs. Fetched says so anyway, and I have no reason to doubt her.

Shortly after I took this picture, I got the weed-eater and cut it all down — I figure it will come back better now that it’s gone to seed. Before that, I zapped the frondy border plants that are supposed to be cut back every year. I cleaned up some of the big garage, finding three washer hoses (all bad, according to Mrs. Fetched, so why were they in there?), several half-used bottles of motor oil, infinity dead ladybugs, and a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff that will get carted to the community yard sale (I think they start next month). Daughter Dearest’s boyfriend got an NTSC monitor for his PlayStation, one of four that Mrs. Fetched had laying around from her analog editing days — to my surprise, he took the smallest one because it wouldn’t require a lot of space. I think I’ll take the other three to the yard sale too, mark them as “gamer monitors,” and see if anyone bites. Somewhere in there, I put the wick in the kerosene heater, but I think I need to dump the old kerosene and try again.

But I digress. I also began a pine eradication program harvested my mulch garden. I’ll let them dry out for a month or so then feed them to the chipper-shredder. We transplanted some bushes, then I got the Mantis out and tilled up a bed and planted some garlic that my friends gave to me. I covered the dirt with some of the brush grass, hoping that will keep the dogs from digging in it. Finally, we fixed the weatherstripping on the bottom of a door. Yeah, it’s been a busy day, but it beats chicken house work. :-) Besides, it’s part of my escape plan: we can’t get away from the chicken houses unless we sell FAR Manor, and we’ll have a better chance of selling it if the place is cleaned up. So I’m going to work on getting rid of stuff we don’t need, which will make the rest easier to keep tidied up!

March has definitely come in like a lion. The claws (heavy storms) went well south of us, but the roaring wind is still with us and probably will be through tomorrow.

Flowers

More stuff blooming around FAR Manor this morning:







What’s up at your place? Sound off in the comments or just point to a link on your own blog!

Full bloom

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz —
I wonder where the birdies is?

So goes a favorite doggerel of an old college buddy, whom we called Johanna Banana back when. The current answer to her question might be “Florida,” judging from the birds we saw in abundance there last week. Anyway....

We came home to find everything is in bloom around the manor. Dogwoods usually flower around April 1 on this planet.


This tree stands guard at the corner of the garage. This time of year, it buzzes to warn intruders away... or maybe it’s just the bees who swarm the top of the tree and leave us the bottom eight feet.


A closer look at that tree.


On the opposite corner of the manor house, there’s a flowering cherry tree. Cherry blossoms are supposed to be a favorite subject of haiku poets.


The dogwood tree by my outbuilding. During the summer, it provides a little shade. It won’t be long before I have to hoist the air conditioner unit into the window, though.


The dogwood bloom resembles a blood-tipped cross. That, and its flowering close to Easter, has obvious connotations among us Christian types. As a kid, I pointed that out to a Catholic friend and he promptly ate one — much to my astonishment. He didn’t get sick, but I wouldn’t make a habit of that. Some plants are toxic, after all (cherry trees are toxic to cattle, for example).


Planet Georgia’s flower is the Cherokee Rose, but if I’d had to guess I would have said it was the azalea. Or kudzu.


My sage plants are about to bloom and the parsley has gone absolutely bonkers in the last two weeks — it’s starting to produce seed and is threatening to engulf the adjacent rosemary plant. I picked up pennyroyal and lemon balm, and another rosemary (it looked so cute) while out and about yesterday as well.

Signs of spring

The last two weekends have involved yard work. It’s amazing how a simple thing like mowing down some border plants (they grow better when they’ve been zapped) leads to all sorts of other stuff. First you see all the fronds in the yard, so you rake ’em up. There’s a big bunch of grass raked up with the fronds. Next thing you know, you’ve got the generator out of mothballs, a blower plugged in, and then there’s an enormous pile of leaves and clippings burning. And what passes for a front lawn at FAR Manor is a little longer than the house and no more than 15 feet deep. Mrs. Fetched saw what I was doing and started in on the other side of the driveway (which parallels the front of the house). Thus does a 15 minute job run all afternoon.

The back yard is a bit bigger, and has been neglected for quite a while. I finally got tired of looking out the bathroom window at a bunch of sticks and twigs on the ground, got out the rakes & blower again, pulled up a zillion little pine trees (Dad helped with that quite a bit) and made a border with some logs that I will probably never get around to splitting. This side will be the yard, that side is the woods. The leaves I threw in the dog run area, also known as the moonscape.

There’s not a lot of lawn out back, which has a lot to do with the trees that nearly took over. Since some of them were leaning toward the house, we had some people come out to cut them down. Others we had a lumber company pay us to take away (they wanted the pines, which had pine beetles in them anyway). But I digress.

Warm days have brought the potted herbs outside until tomorrow afternoon (it’s supposed to get chilly again tomorrow night). I’m hearing the frogs (a spring kigo for haiku writers) peeping in nearby ponds or creeks. I can’t seem to get grass to grow right (hey, less mowing that way), but lots of other stuff just comes up on its own.

Wild onions in the yard. I added some (domestic) chives to my potted herbs, so I haven’t need to harvest them. Besides, with the dogs running around loose... yuck.


Daffodils on the roadside. They’re hardy little boogers; they grow alongside most of the roads around here and you can see them down in the woods. A cheerful reminder that winter is almost over.


The pansies are also hardy; Mrs. Fetched keeps some out through the winter and they’re still hanging around. I’ll remember to get pictures. Maybe.