Spring
It’s Spring and the miracles are happening once again. The grass is growing, the trees have leaves, the flowers are out, and the sprinkling system is all goofed up.
Carol started seedlings months ago and now they are going in the ground. She asks me to put more water on the chard. I can’t tell chard from kale. She rolls her eyes and shows me where.
Winter is hard on sprinkler systems, especially the drip systems supposed to save water. They get stepped on, kicked, blow apart, and just break. I get soaked hunting down leaks and missing fittings. I just discovered a new type of stake with sprinklers built in that may help. We’ll see.
It’s getting harder to do all the fixing. Sprinklers don’t work, but some of my parts aren’t in very good shape as well. I have trouble getting up and down. My knees hurt. My back hurts. I have trouble pressing tubing on fittings with my arthritic wrists. I am getting lots of practice groaning. Every year I have to splice the underground hoses because I chop into them with the shovel or axe.
Pulaski
Yes, the axe. We have trees and shrubs and they have roots. Right now I am in the process of replacing rock edging with bricks to make mowing easier. Problem is, it is right next to a maple tree. Did you know maples have shallow root systems? I chop the roots with a Pulaski, a wildland firefighting tool with an axe on one side and a grubbing hoe on the other side. It works well, but that big head is heavy. I chop for a short time, stop to catch my breath, and chop again. Carol has suggested I mark where the brick line is to go because my line wavers trying to miss the big roots. What I have finished looks a lot better than rocks, however.
It’s worth it. The yard and garden are beautiful, I get exercise, Lowe’s makes money selling me parts, and we will get lots of good stuff to eat. The spring produce is mostly leafy greens, so I have to eat salads. The evil woman even sneaks kale into the salads.
The Japanese Beetle War continues. We applied milky spore to the lawn which is supposed to infect the grubs and kill them. There is also a chemical grub product that’s only mildly poisonous. The grubs eat the grass roots, killing it, then pupate and hatch the beetles when hot weather arrives. The bare spots in the lawn are recovering and we may have a few less Beetles. If only all the neighbors would do the same thing.
We also have a new rechargeable hand vacuum to suck the little demons off the leaves. Leaves. The creatures eat some leaves and ignore others. They love many roses, ignore others, and love grape leaves. They like linden tree leaves, but our tree is big and robust. So much for our grape arbor over the patio. We are investigating alternatives. It’s good they don’t eat everything, or we would have to eat them.
In the meantime, beauty reigns. The raspberry bushes are springing up, flowers are out, and the veggies are growing away. We also are going to have peaches. We had three frosts when the tree was blooming, but the frost mostly did a good job of thinning the fruit.