Gettin' Dirty

Well, Spring is officially here. I worked outside in the yard today for the first time. This will be the third year we've had to get this house's yard into some type of respectable condition, and we have been making progress. When we first moved in, it was sooooo overgrown. The soil around our house is very fertile - anything and everything grows in it. My roommates and I quickly learned how to saw and chop and dig up, and things are starting to get under control. The woman who owned this house before we moved in took "creative license" with her gardening habits. When she planted bushes (like lilac or spirea), she put them in a wire frame - the kind you would use for a tomato plant. This may have been a good idea when the bush was small, but it seems she would forget about that frame and the bush would continue to grow around it until it was impossible to get the frame out unless you sawed through the frame (a task for which we do not yet have the correct tool). She also liked to plant her bushes really close together, with no thought that they would get bigger as they grew. In the front of the house we had a lilac/spirea combo ensconced in a wire frame. While the bush(es) where healthy, it was just too much. So I chopped that whole sucker down. (It's much easier on the psyche to chop a bush down before it starts to bloom. After the flowers are out it just feels too "wrong")

In case you (Mom) are reading this and crying out "What! You chopped down a perfectly healthy lilac bush?!" Let me assure we have about 3 or 4 more perfectly healthy lilac bushes in our back yard. (Last summer it was more like 5 or 6, but again we chopped some down.) Seriously, this woman had issues with the lilacs. And grapevine. Don't even get me started on her obsession with grapevine.

The aforementioned wire frame in the lilac/spirea bush in the front of our house was implanted so deep that I could not pull or dig it out because it had a root growing around it. So now without the bush to hide it we have an ever-so-attractive bent-out-of-shape wire frame sticking out of the ground. Awesome.

As you may imagine, all this chopping and digging up leads to quite a pile of yard rubbish. In other cities, you could probably pull this rubbish out to your curb once a month on bulk pick-up day. Not in Detroit. With the city close to $300 million in debt, some services had to be cut, and bulk pick-up was one of the first to go. So now we have in our backyard an ever-growing pile of yard rubbish - stuff left over from last fall combined with what we'll be hacking away this spring. We don't have plans yet on what to do with it all, but I know sooner or later someone will knock on our door and offer to haul it away for a price. We may just have to take him up on the offer.

On the plus side, the former homeowner did plant quite a number of crocus, daffodil, and tulip bulbs, which we are now enjoying. The crocus are out and almost done I think, but the daffys and tulips are coming along nicely.

Sometimes I get frustrated because I feel we spend so much time trying to keep the growth under control that we don't have the chance to plant stuff we really want- like more flowers or a vegetable garden. I think I've become used to the idea that getting this yard in the shape we want it will take several more seasons than I had orginally thought. It does feel good though, to be outside and get dirty.