Well, this is fun….NOT! I nearly had the whole post written last night and Word crashed and lost it. So here we go again…
The wood guys showed up around 8:45AM and got right to work. The top photo is before they arrived and the bottom after they left. They said there’s probably 2½ cords in that pile. It’s not great wood, and anything that was on the ground rotted in the 3+ years it sat out there. They pushed those over the bank. What’s left will go over once all the good wood is in the shed on May 8th.
It’s amazing to watch the precision and adeptness of people who learn a job well, along with what the huge machines can do. They finished about noontime.
While they were doing that, I went up and got the push mower and rider from the barn and mowed the yard for the first time. Then I mowed up around the barn.
The crabgrass in the center had been growing wildly in the wildflower area so I scalped it in hopes of slowing it down and letting something else have a chance.
In the 2nd Fence garden the ‘King Alfred’ daffodils are a bright spot. In the top photo you can see the ones the frost got bent over. ‘King Alfreds’ are a large daffodil and I love the deep color.
The daffodils are really coming along in the Fence gardens.
I had planted several varieties of small daffodils in the 4th Fence garden. They’ve done very well there.
In the 7th Fence garden, the daffodils are holding their own. This is another garden not cleaned out since 2019. It’s supposed to be an iris garden.
Last spring I planted the Small quince in the area between the New Herb garden and the 6th & 7th Fence gardens. It had a few buds on it this year.
In the South garden the wood hyacinth has its first flowers.
In the South Herb garden, the westerly flowering almond has 1 flower opening.
In the Big garden the garlic is doing very well.
The Big quince that’s still in the Big garden has flowers open.
The Contender peach #9 of the little trees, is covered with flowers, on the left. On the right, #10 York elderberry is leafing out well. That’s the best of the elderberries.
The #11 Juneberry, the last in the row, has lots of nice leaves coming. Up by the house, the #12 sugar maple has finally put leaves out. I was worried about it, as the older maples had flowers weeks ago.
All the little trees are beginning to leaf out. As it’s now the end of April, I will be taking the protectors off the trunks and branches. If left in place, they tend to harbor damaging pests.
Before I mowed, I went around and took off all the frost bent daffodils, as the mower would have gotten them. I got 2 nice bouquets for the house.
Pushing the mower around for the first time this year really wore me out, so I wasn’t up to much all afternoon, mostly napping. Tom came by just before supper with the truck. He’d gotten the tune-up done and had it ready to be inspected on Monday afternoon.
He’s looking at the Kubota tractor our neighbor has. It’s a small one that I could drive and has a small brushhog that would work well at Tom’s small place. So we’re thinking about getting it. Tom needs to find a trailer to get it back and forth.
Monday I will be starting on the back 40, where most of the poison ivy is. I will try to get those fences back up. Hopefully my son or Tom can cut the trees back for the hay guys this week. I plan to save the middle and front pastures for my helpers to do, as they don’t need to get poison ivy and there’s not much upfront.