Yarding and Working
Whew!
Well, I have officially just about killed myself on the outside of the house this weekend. On Thursday the kids and I were eating lunch outside on the deck and it was such NICE weather! The breeze was blowing and I commented, "Hmmm...you can hear the wind blowing through the grass. We're going to have to mow that this weekend. Lots to do, guy, lots to do." Much to my total annoyance later that afternoon, I discovered a City Wrist-Slap document affixed to our front door. Blah, blah, blah, housing association, blah, blah, grass exceeding length limits, blah, blah, open trash container (yes, it's called a combination of a flip-top lid (courtesy of YOU, the City) and the wind), blah, blah, fines and imprisonment, rant, rant, follow-up inspections, governmental interrogations, UN black helicopters, whatever. They can most seriously bite me on forty different levels, y'know? That's like when you're a kid and you've just initiated a plan to clean your room, and your idiot parents walk by, spy you picking crap up, and say, "Clean your room!" Seriously. Bite me.
So Friday morning I hauled out the mower and got the front half of the lawn done while the kids planted what must've been a thousand marigold seeds along the front walk. I got about halfway through the side yard and ran out of gas (natch!), so I abandoned the mowing in favor of a hoe, which I then took around to the front garden area and hacked up and buried every weed I could find. The kids got bored after awhile, and I went back over their work, busting apart more marigold seed pods and spreading them out more evenly, eventually watering them to lessen their chances of blowing away. Then I went to the north side of the house and hacked up a ton of weeds and encroaching grass over there...by this time the kids decided to come back out and play on the jungle gym, and they got to come over and see the worms I dug up and even a few worm eggs. Of course then THEY had to dig, so they found tiny rakes and trowels and I told them to knock themselves out...there was nothing in that garden area, anyway. They had a blast. I moved over to my veggie garden and hacked up everything in there, too, and churned it around so the weeds would rot a little faster. By this time I was just DONE with yardwork, so I hauled the kids in and threw them into a bath (joy!) and cleaned the grime off my own sad self. Oh, I am so SO sadly out of shape...I hurt for hours after that little eco-maniacal display.
The next day I spent a great deal of time figuring out ways to shrink the lawn...I'm still not sure what we're going to do...and we went to TLC to get a bush to fill in the blank space in the foundation plantings along the garage. Doug tried his hardest to tell me it was a boxwood that we needed, which I totally denied. He then went on to inform me that boxwoods were called boxwoods because people usually cut the bushes into the shape of boxes. I was too incredulous to respond. I don't have any documentation to prove it, but I strongly suspect that it has much more to do with the fact that the plant comes from the genus Buxus. This assurance of the need to buy a boxwood went on until I pulled out the original landscaping plans drawn up in 2002, which confirmed what we needed was a dense yew.
So we went to TLC and picked a yew, along with some kind of bug poison...we have a very bad sort of borer which has decimated the dwarf cherry tree, and is hard at work on the crabapple, too. Turns out the cherry tree is actually three trees spliced into one...the root ball is one type of tree, the trunk is another, and they graft a weeping cherry onto the top. I had NO IDEA this was the case when we got it, or I'd never have purchased it. The poor thing is being attacked at the trunk, and of course it's trying to save its own life, so now the root ball and trunk are sending out offshoots, and the poor thing looks like a Franken-tree. Since only the cherry and crabapple trees seem to be affected, I wondered if it was just a fruit borer, but they said that it doesn't seem to matter much, they'll attack anything. So we're going to put the bug stuff on the affected AND the healthy trees as a preventative.
And finally yesterday Doug got gas for the mower and finished off the lawn, and I used the weed-eater to trim around the house, down the driveway, and around all the posts, trees and the sandbox.
I have also come to conclusion that we've GOT to start mulching around the sandbox. And the jungle gym.
My neighbors in the back of us also informed us that they have termites. Oh, joy.
Well, I have officially just about killed myself on the outside of the house this weekend. On Thursday the kids and I were eating lunch outside on the deck and it was such NICE weather! The breeze was blowing and I commented, "Hmmm...you can hear the wind blowing through the grass. We're going to have to mow that this weekend. Lots to do, guy, lots to do." Much to my total annoyance later that afternoon, I discovered a City Wrist-Slap document affixed to our front door. Blah, blah, blah, housing association, blah, blah, grass exceeding length limits, blah, blah, open trash container (yes, it's called a combination of a flip-top lid (courtesy of YOU, the City) and the wind), blah, blah, fines and imprisonment, rant, rant, follow-up inspections, governmental interrogations, UN black helicopters, whatever. They can most seriously bite me on forty different levels, y'know? That's like when you're a kid and you've just initiated a plan to clean your room, and your idiot parents walk by, spy you picking crap up, and say, "Clean your room!" Seriously. Bite me.
So Friday morning I hauled out the mower and got the front half of the lawn done while the kids planted what must've been a thousand marigold seeds along the front walk. I got about halfway through the side yard and ran out of gas (natch!), so I abandoned the mowing in favor of a hoe, which I then took around to the front garden area and hacked up and buried every weed I could find. The kids got bored after awhile, and I went back over their work, busting apart more marigold seed pods and spreading them out more evenly, eventually watering them to lessen their chances of blowing away. Then I went to the north side of the house and hacked up a ton of weeds and encroaching grass over there...by this time the kids decided to come back out and play on the jungle gym, and they got to come over and see the worms I dug up and even a few worm eggs. Of course then THEY had to dig, so they found tiny rakes and trowels and I told them to knock themselves out...there was nothing in that garden area, anyway. They had a blast. I moved over to my veggie garden and hacked up everything in there, too, and churned it around so the weeds would rot a little faster. By this time I was just DONE with yardwork, so I hauled the kids in and threw them into a bath (joy!) and cleaned the grime off my own sad self. Oh, I am so SO sadly out of shape...I hurt for hours after that little eco-maniacal display.
The next day I spent a great deal of time figuring out ways to shrink the lawn...I'm still not sure what we're going to do...and we went to TLC to get a bush to fill in the blank space in the foundation plantings along the garage. Doug tried his hardest to tell me it was a boxwood that we needed, which I totally denied. He then went on to inform me that boxwoods were called boxwoods because people usually cut the bushes into the shape of boxes. I was too incredulous to respond. I don't have any documentation to prove it, but I strongly suspect that it has much more to do with the fact that the plant comes from the genus Buxus. This assurance of the need to buy a boxwood went on until I pulled out the original landscaping plans drawn up in 2002, which confirmed what we needed was a dense yew.
So we went to TLC and picked a yew, along with some kind of bug poison...we have a very bad sort of borer which has decimated the dwarf cherry tree, and is hard at work on the crabapple, too. Turns out the cherry tree is actually three trees spliced into one...the root ball is one type of tree, the trunk is another, and they graft a weeping cherry onto the top. I had NO IDEA this was the case when we got it, or I'd never have purchased it. The poor thing is being attacked at the trunk, and of course it's trying to save its own life, so now the root ball and trunk are sending out offshoots, and the poor thing looks like a Franken-tree. Since only the cherry and crabapple trees seem to be affected, I wondered if it was just a fruit borer, but they said that it doesn't seem to matter much, they'll attack anything. So we're going to put the bug stuff on the affected AND the healthy trees as a preventative.
And finally yesterday Doug got gas for the mower and finished off the lawn, and I used the weed-eater to trim around the house, down the driveway, and around all the posts, trees and the sandbox.
I have also come to conclusion that we've GOT to start mulching around the sandbox. And the jungle gym.
My neighbors in the back of us also informed us that they have termites. Oh, joy.
posted by Kelly at
2:53 AM
1 Comments:
So here you are doing yard work...
We're under a winter storm warning today. The foothills already have 21 inches of snow, and the mountains have several feet, of course. It's been raining all day and as it cools off we're supposed to get four inches of snow overnight. The suburbs south of us could pick up an additional 18 inches of snow.
But since it's spring, the snow will probably be all melted off by the weekend and as soon as things dry out, we'll all be in our yards too, mowing and clipping grass and weeds that will have grown like crazy due to the moisture. It all evens out, I guess.
As far as I know, we still don't have termites in this part of the country. Not yet, anyway. Speaking of insects, according to Earthweek, "Studies conducted by German researchers indicate that the growing use of cell phones could in some way be responsible for the sudden, mysterious disappearance of bees seen across America and parts of Europe since last fall."
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