I've written about the Merry-go-round of outdoor spring cleaning before, but since it's what I've been doing on these balmy days, it's an easy way to write a column. This year, as you know if you read my last column, the pine tree planting to hide my new neighbor's house was a top priority, but other garden chores were also crying out to be done.
I always start my spring cleanup with the perennial border since it looks terrible until I do - old dead stalks, dead leaves burying the daffodils, weeds easily pulled at this time of year. What I should have started on was the asparagus bed. That job was one that Hank always did for me, so by the time I remembered it, the first few spears had already pushed up through the tired mess of old stalks and heavy mulch.
Hank hated weeding so his solution was to sprinkle 25 pounds of rock salt on the bed before putting on new mulch. Asparagus loves salt whereas weeds definitely do not. Unlike Hank I like to weed so once I'd gotten rid of the old mulch, I spent a couple of hours pulling quack grass.
Quack grass has an amazing root system, the reason it manages to keep coming up despite the salt. Loosen the soil and uproot a clump of this wretched grass and you can follow the fleshy white root for four or five feet and probably reach another clump. It's very satisfying work, and once the bed was weeded I did the salt routine. By then I'd found just enough fresh asparagus for dinner.
My next priority was getting manure onto the vegetable garden, another chore that Hank had always done. The John Deere tractor, with its power steering, power breaks and fancy bucket is much more difficult to handle than the ancient 1938 International Harvester tractor we'd finally replaced, that I've never been very comfortable with it, but I didn't have much choice. When I'd finally gotten everything in neutral and started this powerful monster, I gingerly headed for the manure pile. I lowered the bucket, tilted it and gunned the tractor at the pile.
With the bucket lifted back up, I headed for the garden, having already put the sheep in the lower pasture and opened the gates and section of fence so I could dump my load. What a laugh. I'd managed to scoop up about two pounds of manure. My second load wasn't quite as pathetic and I topped it off with my shovel. By the fourth load I'd become an expert.
Then, because it's always more fun to plant something than spread manure or rototill, I thought I'd transplant some of the well-rooted forsythia that had started from the branches of several bushes. I've done this in past years, planting them against the pasture fence across the meadow, but only two have survived. Forsythia, graceful and showy from a distance - that's what I wanted, so I planted six new attempts.
While I was working on that fence
line, I stopped to clean out the bluebird
houses I'd never gotten around to earlier.
Hank built and put up 10 bluebird houses
on various fence posts around the property
to encourage these appealing birds. It
didn't help. Each spring the tree swallows
get here before the bluebirds and take
ownership of all the bluebird houses.
Tree swallows are beautiful, white-breasted
with metallic blue wings, but they aren't
very friendly to other birds.
Ah, but just last year Hank learned that if you put two houses a mere twenty feet apart, the tree swallow who settles in one of them will not allow another tree swallow to build in the other, but will let a bluebird occupy it. Hank promptly rearranged all the birdhouses, but I wasn't thinking about birds last spring, so I don't know how successful the idea is. This year I'll pay attention and let you know if it works.
I've done a lot of other spring chores, a lot of weeding, carefully saving the "wooly bears" that are curled up beneath the old leaves, pruning the quince bushes in the border, which would like to take over, repairing leaks in outside water pipes, and periodically stopping to just enjoy Mother Nature's spectacular display - the feathery pale yellow of the maple tree, the ethereal white of the shadblows blooming across the meadow, the sight of finding the first wine red beginnings of a tree peony I thought had died.
May probably requires more work from the gardener than any other month, but it is also the most rewarding. I hope you're reveling in it as much as I am.
