On Monday morning, I finally got started because I was expecting a delivery of mulch at 9AM. I got the laundry washed and hung out. I don’t think I’ve hung laundry out since 2019, or maybe 2018, due to construction.
It was to be a beautiful sunny day and I got the rest of the raking finished.
The pastures are starting to green up.
It was about 11AM when I finished the raking and I took a break for lunch. The mulch still hadn’t arrived. Seems it would be delivered “after 9AM”.
I was walking across the backyard and saw this red thing on the ground. A closer glance showed it was a clump of maple flowers.
So I looked up to see if I could find the tree and there it was, in the swamp behind the woodshed.
In the East Shed garden these ‘Tweety Bird’ daffodils had opened.
In the 1st Fence garden, one of the buds I showed recently was about to open.
In the 2nd Fence garden a whole clump had opened.
I tried for a lot of shots to get a decent one of the quince buds in the Big garden, but this was the only one, and not very good at that.
The forsythia buds on the old shrubs have started to open.
Around 1PM it was pretty warm outside, and I’d rested a while so I headed out to tackle the last of the 3 gardens abandoned in 2019, the New North garden.
I started in the sun at this end as it was pretty cool in the shade. This is the pink lily of the valley bed and it had been overrun with ferns, colt’s foot, and snow drops.
I got all those dug out and put some loam back in. The decorative patio block has totally disintegrated and I am unable to find any locally so far. So I put a stone in place to try to buffer the downspout.
Then I tackled the mass of astilbe. It was full of fern roots, as was the bed. I got the roots cleaned out and replanted the astilbe. I hope it will grow this spring. I moved onto some bulbs next to it, snowdrops, crocus and wood hyacinth, and got the ferns out of those.
But I had moved out of the sun and it was really too cold for me to be working in the shade, so I quit.
In the New Herb garden, there are masses of heart’s ease aka Johnny Jump-ups in the walkways. They are the only color right now.
In one bed this chamomile volunteer came up.
In Row 6, the lady’s mantle is doing well. I often don’t know if it will survive from one year to the next.
The Row 7 echinacea bed is pretty decimated by the chipmunks. It looks like half of the plants are gone.
It got to be 3:15 and no sign of mulch so I called. Apparently they had forgotten.
The guy who delivered it informed me that we could have rebuilt the septic system for a fraction of the cost because it was grandfathered, having worked well for 40 years. But, he said, the Boards of Health and engineers won’t tell you that and no, they certainly hadn’t told us. It would have saved us tens of thousands of dollars if they had. This was not news I needed to hear 3 years later. Too late now…
On Tuesday my cleaning helper is coming and I hope we can get most of the standards up and the light hangers. The brackets are supposed to be delivered on Tuesday afternoon. She can come back on Wednesday, so we will be doing major overhauls of all set-ups except the roundtop.