Jinxing ourselves by thinking that spring had finally come in our last post was a little upsetting. With hopes of getting some work done before we head on our holidays, mother nature decided to play a not so foolish April fools prank on us, by dumping 1/2″ of snow! But that wasn’t the end of it, we got a little more at the beginning of last week.  Thank goodness we hadn’t actually started anything major in our yard.

With actual spring weather on the horizon, we are carefully optimistic about getting some stuff done before we leave. We still hope to get our root vegetables tucked into their beds, but will likely wait until right before we leave before doing that…just to be safe.

We do also still hope to at least start putting another wall in. Our plan has been downgraded to just getting it dug and the posts cemented in, ready for when we are home. We can then get them filled in the cooler weather when we get back…although it will be prime fishing season when we get back, so it may just be some work done in the evenings after work.

Today we lucked out and got some beautiful, warm, sunny, spring weather. Itching to get into our garden, K and I headed out and started to get some work done.

I really wanted to get the strawberry tower cleaned out of all the rotten or dead debris. I have noticed the last few times I walked the yard, that there were nice green leaves poking through and I want to make sure they get as much of that good sun as they can.

As you can see, we did not do any cleaning in the fall. We mostly expected the strawberries to die over the winter like they did last year, but these seem to be much hardier plants and have surprised us with solid and strong plants. So, I set to getting them all cleaned up and ready to start growing us more delicious strawberries.

It took some time, the creepers had gone EVERYWHERE, but they are all ready to spread out and grow big for when we get home. We will snip the creepers for the first month or two, and then let them start setting in again. A few were so determined last year, that they managed to get roots through our industrial landscaping fabric below the cherry tree, so we will also keep an eye out there to make sure they don’t spread too far.

K decided to give our dreaded tree stump a haircut. We have decided to get a friend over to chop it down to about 4′-5′ height. I am then going to put some sort of paint or coating on it to stop it from coming back. Our plan is to put a bird hotel up there…a new building project! I am excited because I have some really fun ideas for it, including a little bridge from one hotel to the other, or from one of the two halves of the stump as it splits about 3′ up. We have so many birds all the time in our yard, hopefully they will make a home there. I will also throw in a few bug hotels as well.

Once that was done, K went to work on one of our beds, ridding it of all the weeds that seem to take hold every spring. Unfortunately, the clouds started rolling in, so we decided to call it a day and hopefully, weather permitting, we can get some more done out there tomorrow after work.