Jaci Dawn

It was a perfect Spring weekend in which I endeavored to kill myself.

Truth. I decided to transform this:

Into this:

That is a lot of sod to remove. There’s a trick to removing sod by hand. You have to have a good edger and slightly wet soil. First you edge the area you want to remove, then yopu get down on your knees and slide the edger up underneath the grass roots, and slowly peel the sod away.

It is not easy, and I had to feel like I was twenty years younger to even attempt this feat this weekend.

I even cleared the sod above the strawberries, although I cannot tell you what possessed me to push my body that far.

I didn’t just dirty my jeans. I killed my back. The arthritis in my hands screams.

I had to leave the grass in this clump of irises.

And mingled in with my purple aster. There is an aster in that clump of grass. I don’t know how to separate the grass from the aster.

The iris, I know how: after it has bloomed, I will have to lift each rhizome from the soil, pry the grass roots away, and replant. I’m not up to it just prior to blooming season.

My husband pruned his Hawthorne back. This tree has been run over by Caterpillars (the big yellow, mechanical kind) and chewed down by deer. We dug it up and transplanted it into our city yard when we moved into town from the country. Don is determined to keep it shrub-sized.

He gave up at this point. You can see he will have to top that Hawthorne and soon. That poor Camellia in the background is going to suffer come heavy pruning this Spring as well.

Spring is always about whipping the garden back into shape. The better shape you left it in in the fall, the less work in the Spring. My problem is that every Spring, I want to expand on what I developed the prior year. I have lofty dreams for this yard.

We also have some pests to be rid of.

Sometime in the last 12 months, we gained a rat or a rat family. Evidence of the rat’s hoarding began to show up in the garage in the form of shelled sunflower seeds.

I’ll have to quit feeding the birds for a time this summer while we seek out and destroy the rat and cleanse its habitat. <sigh> I just hope it’s not one of those great big Norway rats. The dogs hope they can catch it before we do (and we hope they don’t, despite the fact they have current rabies vax).

While it was a gorgeous, sunny, warm weekend, each day began below freezing.

The thin film of ice on the bird bath caught my eye before I started my day today. I love Spring for the extremes: freezing in the morning, warm in the day time (or hail, thunder, and lightning, with lots of rain). I just put on a sweatshirt and layer my clothes on those days that are dry enough to do yard work.

I promise that I paced myself. It took me two days to get the north flower bed weeded and shaped. When I was younger, I would have done it all in one day.

Hervey wants you to know he “helped”. I swear I brush him. He just always looks like this half-brushed, unkempt dog.

He’s getting his hair cut off next weekend. He’ll be so much happier. So will I.

We ended the day with a fire in the firepit that Don received as a retirement gift last year. It’s the first fire we’ve burned in the pit.

Ahhhhh.

I watched this fellow sun himself and then he scurried for a cooler place to be as the fire heated up.

Yay. They don’t warn you about the paint emitting fumes as the fire warms the pit. Kind of reminds me of the smoke from my mother’s cigarettes.

It was a beautiful Spring day that ended with a cozy fire. I love how this looks like some sort of creature with two tiny red eyes and a big red mouth.

Happy first Spring weekend!