The Garden

This spring has been, to put in mildly, putting a damper on activities of clean-up and working the ground for plants. But things have dried off nicely this week. It was good to also be free of the job (for the summer months), and direct my energies toward a couple of new flower gardens.

The above is an area that my husband and I cleaned up last year. We cut out a lot of trees and brush, leaving the older trees in place. So, now I'm working on this spot, and have gotten what I want in for now.

Above is a lupine, very mature and it wanted to go into the ground, but alas, I became sick in between having dug this one up and what with rain and really cold temps, it didn't get done. More on that later.

Above is a "zero turn" mower made by X-Mark. This one has a smaller deck, I believe it's 5 feet wide. My husband uses one like this for "trimming" around borders etc. in the park. His larger mower--70" deck--he does the larger areas, which the largest one will take him two days to mow. 

Anyway, he showed me how to drive this one. Note the nice little wagon on the back. It carries a lot more than my wheelbarrow.

About two weeks ago my aim was to work on this area underneath the pines out back.

I need to tell you about this incredible looking tool. It is what you use to pop dandelions up, instead of trying to get the whole root, which now they've discovered you only need to get just underneath the ground. And this tool is definitely a wonderful invention and gets up ANY hard to pull weed.

Here are my other tools which I used to cut away branches of the pine trees (and others, when I need to).

And here is a faster way of getting the job done. Unfortunately this saw didn't want to work.

Back to the hand tools.

This area took me most of the day to dig out these annoying weeds beneath the trees. The deer have no interest in them, unfortunately.

That's me. See weeds to the right? Those are the ones I was after.

Below you can see a better picture of how large they were.

Once we were done, we decided, since it was cool, to build a fire and...

 Cook some 'dogs. Note my husband's firebuilding technique is not your typical "tee-pee" style. He calls it "log cabin". This sort of fire will last through rain, snow and hail. I've seen it when we camped in the Rockies. I kid you not, this is the very best way to build a long lasting fire.

My next objective, and one of the spots which you see from our kitchen window, and made me cringe every time I looked at it. The water tower has been here as long as the house--over 100 years. Maybe longer, but I don't know. It's the only one of its kind in our county.

You can see how it needs attention. A mulberry keeps growing up around the grape vine--that's that large snake-like thing growing up on right hand side of the base. Grape vines grow very quickly. My husband happens to like it, so it stayed.

More on this clean-up in a later post.