Last week my brother got the 2 front pastures weedwacked.
On Friday I interviewed a house cleaner to try to get the house back in shape. In the afternoon I went to the Senior Center for a talk about a now closed amusement park in a nearby town. It had opened in the late 1800’s and closed in the late 1980’s. Here’s a bit about it.
I had never been to it and was curious. The speaker was very good, with lots of stories and old photographs he had found in all his researching. But it ran over by an hour and we were all pretty stiff when we got up to leave.
I didn’t get much done on Friday as I was still recovering from pastures and tree cutting.
On Saturday I had contemplated finishing the rose garden, but it would have taken a lot of standing, and I just wasn’t up to it. So I decided to weed the New Herb garden again. We’d done a good job on it in March but the weeds were back. I got out there at 7AM.
I started at the far end of Row 1 and after taking out a whole sled full of leaves, I realized I’d have to tie up the woad and the tansy to have room to work. So I got that done.
The wormwood was doing well, but a lot of the old plant had died. It was about 18” high.
The next bed was pyrethrum and that had to be replanted. But it wasn’t ready to come outside yet. There were several things, austragulus and blue flax and others that had not yet been brought outside to harden off. The nights have been too cold so far. By Tuesday, the nights are to stay in the 50’s for a while and I will be bringing a lot of things outside.
Next was woad, a dye plant. This was before I tied it back. It’s always very early in the spring.
The next plant that was up was elecampane. This will grow to be one of the bigger plants in the garden. It was about 15” high and has developed a lot of plants in its bed.
The next plant was butterflyweed. It had just poked through the soil but it is one of the later plants.
Next in line was feverfew. The 3 plants I had transplanted a week or so ago were doing very well. They were about 18” high.
I’d had to remove a lot of this Roman wormwood from the feverfew bed when I planted that. This time I was removing it from the walkway and the Joe Pye bed. I am delighted it has done so well. But because of the way it grows, I can’t mulch it, so I had to spend a good amount of time pulling all the weeds out of it.
The first bed in the row is Joe Pye weed. There are 2 plants in it, one much farther along than the other. It’s funny how much better the inner one is doing…micro climates…
Next I went through and moved what was left of the hay mulch and put a light coat of amendment down on each bed. Now they are ready to plant and mulch.
I had just started Row 2 when my neighbor arrived on her walk with her dog. Her dog is sweet and so we sat on the front steps and talked for a while as I patted the dog. By the time we were done, I didn’t feel like weeding so I cleaned up and went inside for lunch.
The contractor had gotten the supports up in the loft of the woodshed a couple days ago and my son finally got the fence rails up on them and out of the weather.
Then he dragged the huge bags from the firewood into the cellar and we dumped all the kindling in each one into a single bag.
Once the fence rails were put away, I pulled the worst of the weeds out of this West Shed bed, then moved onto the Old North, North Corner, and West gardens and did the same. It wasn’t a proper weeding, just getting the biggest and worst offenders out.
I’d had 400# of amendments sitting in my kitchen for a couple weeks. With the cleaners coming on Monday to do the kitchen first, I asked my brother to move them to the Tonka garage where they belonged. So we got that done while supper cooked.
After supper we took the truck down to put gas into it and to fill the gas cans for mowing all summer. We made a run through town to see what new flowers were out. There are an awful lot of lovely dogwoods in town. I wish I could have one here, but it would not survive.
On Sunday I plan to finish the rosebed that I started a few weeks ago. I have to make another trellis for the climbing rose and weed the bed to find the edging. I also need to tie up the roses to the trellises so I can mow around them. It’s to be a cloudy cool day so I can wear long sleeves and not get (too) scratched up.