There are a number of yard work related chores I’ve been needing to get done. So far I’ve been picking away at them. Last weekend it was literally picking away at them. The front yard has been overtaken with weeds, so I spent time picking a bunch of them out. There are still piles there but I put a pretty good dent in them.
When I was out there weeding I had wished I had some better earphones to wear while listening to music out in the yard. I didn’t want anything really good though for fear of wreaking them. Yesterday I remembered that I still had the pair of WordPress earphones Automattic had sent me when I first started. They were good and comfortable but they had broken not long after getting them. Part of the plastic broke which connected the left ear piece to the head band piece. After trying a couple types of glue, which didn’t hold for more than 5 minutes, I had put them away and forgot about them.
Before I went out to mow the lawn yesterday I pulled them back out again. This time I brought out my soldering iron, got an old tip for it, and melted the plastic causing the two sided to bond back together. Now I don’t think this will hold for a really long time, but they held up yesterday while mowing the lawn and today out in the yard!
Today was un-fun yard work. Last year we had a strip down the side of the house which we had turned into a bit of a vegetable garden. It worked really well so we decided to expand it this year. We decided to use the whole piece of land on the side of the house. The sod has been all dug up and Jen poured the bags of mushroom compost my sister picked up for us all over, now it had to be tilled up and the compost mixed in.
We looked into renting a tiller to do it, but it would have cost more to rent it then to hire someone who had one to do it for us. So instead I went out with the garden claw and turned up the soil that way mixing in the compost at the same time. It’s times like this where it is obvious the only work I do with my hands, is really with my finger tips on the keyboard. My right hand especially feels like just one big blister.
Although there are a bunch of little projects I would like to do to the yard, the only other one I really want to tackle this year for sure is along the back of the property. We had planted a bunch of little boxwood plants. We were in a hurry to get them in the ground so all we did was dig a hole for each one and put the in. This makes it really hard to mow around, and in behind especially weeds end up growing really tall. So this year I want to make it like a long strip flower bed along the back. Where we dig up the sod again and cover it with mulch in between the bushes. We will also likely plant some flowers in between and around to give it a bit more life.
That won’t happen this weekend though, but hopefully I’ll make time coming up sometime soon.
Sandy McFadden 