The 10th of March in New England and this is the afternoon temps each day this week.
After spending the morning paying bills and learning how to use a cell phone to manage the new bank account, my intern arrived and we got the floor in the bathroom down.
After lunch we headed outside.
The first job was to get the tulips uncovered in the Big garden. One pot was well up but we were just in time and got the hardware cloth off without breaking shoots.
On the way to do the next bulb area, I saw these bulb shoots sticking out of the mulch in the flower area. We had not put bulbs anywhere but in pots in designated areas. These looked like they were in a pot, but there was no pot there.
I suspect they are growing where my goldy mum was. It died last year and there probably were bulbs intermingled in its roots. These are probably snow drops, but they could be star of Bethlehem also.
We were able to uncover bulb area #2 pretty easily. There was 1 pot with nothing up, but it might just be a late starting bulb. Or a critter managed to clean it out when I didn’t get them covered with stones and hardware cloth after they finished blooming.
The garlic in the Big garden hasn’t grown as much as the in the Small garden. The Small garden had tarps that kept the ground from freezing as soon.
Bulb area #1 is near the driveway and the neighbor’s trees shade this area. Everything here was still frozen solid. Maybe next week…
From there we went up to the truck and got the plow up on a block so it won’t freeze down again. My husband’s friend Ted’s brother showed up while we were up there and he got the tractor moved and we got a block under the bucket.
Then he showed my intern how to put a battery charger on the battery of her car. It’s been stored up behind the barn for over a year and the battery goes dead. They plan to move it soon, get it repaired and on the road for when she starts driving in May.
He stayed at the barn and managed to finally get the barn generator running. But it was late when he finished, so he didn’t hook it up to anything to see if it could power things. Next time…
I forgot to put the windbreak cage back on the little tree, a job I’d planned to do with my intern. The wind had blown it off. Instead, we debated about digging up another pot of bulbs and planting it, but I was getting too tired.
So we sat in the lovely warm sun on the front porch for 1½ hours and talked of life.
Today is the anniversary of Ted’s death in 2007, a huge thing in my husband’s life. Now they are together on my kitchen table, and perhaps elsewhere….
Thursday is to be the best day of the week, weatherwise, and I plan to plant a lot more bulbs once it warms up. I will probably help the carpenter get the floor glued down and work some more on paying bills while I wait for it to warm up.