To kick off our Easter weekend, we decided to start getting the yard ready for our upcoming planting season. As mentioned previously, the snow snuck up on us in the fall, and then never went away, so we had a bunch of plants to pull.

We started off with pulling all the plants from the garden, then worked our way through the flower planters at the top of the yard. This didn’t take us too long to complete.

While pulling everything we took a little peek at all our plants growing. The garlics are happily growing, though some had cute little husk hats that we had to remove. The rhubarb is poking through and showing their bright red bulb packed leaves. The tarragon is growing in nicely in the herb planter. The driveway strawberries are starting to show out some new leaves. And while rooting around in our planter, we realized that one of the flowers we planted is actually a perennial not an annual. The Asiatic lilies that we had in the air conditioner planters have happy little bulbs just below the surface. Although I wasn’t a huge fan of these because I prefer lilies that have multiple flowerings throughout the summer, it was still a pretty flower so we left the bulbs be and will welcome back some plants.

We realized that while we were pulling all the plants, we might as well pull all the strawberries out of the tower so that we can start dismantling it. Once done, we loaded everything up into Kurts truck and took it off to a yard waste facility.

Once back from the yard waste facility we realized that since we were running errands like this, that we might as well also do a dump run to get all the garbage out of the shop. Time to dismantle the very rotted strawberry tower.

So we grabbed our little sledge hammer and some gloves and headed down to start pulling apart the strawberry tower. The wood was pretty rotted and parts had collapsed over the winter, so it was a pretty easy job to get it pulled apart and the wood loaded into the truck for the dump run.

It’s always fun finding funky little visuals in the garden. As we pulled the tower apart, we found some cross-section of weeds growing up through the soil. We also found a little ball of partially frozen worms, just starting to thaw out for another summer of helping our garden. We made sure to put them into a new, warm, home over by the asparagus and garlic. And we found some of the bottom soil that was still frozen, had taken on the pattern of the landscaping fabric.

We left the soil in a pile, which we will just distribute into the yard as we start levelling that side. We will still have to take the little garden around the cherry tree out, which houses a very wild and out of control blackberry vine. Then we will have to work on getting the cherry tree out of the way as well. That corner will become our future gazebo, which I would like to frame the pad for this summer and backfill with crushed gravel.

Once we loaded up all our landfill waste, we headed off to the dump. Basil of course, got to come for a truck ride and the nice lady at the dump spoiled her with not one treat, but four treats! She must have been looking extra cute.

It was a great day of getting the yard in tip top shape for planting season as well as to get started on the leveling and path building of the bottom area.

The next day, Kurt actually spent some time raking the entire path, and the full yard to get all the little debris out of the way. It is surprising how much of a difference just raking the areas make to the overall look of the yard. Unfortunately, the little pile of debris will have to wait for our next yard waste dump. But now they yard was setup and ready for Kurt to start some new digging projects and start getting the yard levelled.

Up next, Easter Project 2, rock wall progress.