SPRING STUFF

The weather has been unseasonably warm this past month and everyone is tempted to start their gardens early.  Stuart has tilled our garden and we’ve planted peas and will plant the rest of the seeds in the next few days.

We are in the process of removing a section of lawn just outside the garden gate and turning it into a shrub area with a walkway to the gate.  Of course, Stuart had to move one sprinkler head in our irrigation system and now we have to deal with the sod.  He used the tiller to break it up and will do a second run to dig it up even more.  If we can find a way to just leave the sod on the area to decompose, that would be nice.  We planted 3 new shrubs and moved one other one but the area doesn’t look very attractive yet.

Stuart loves to do irrigation work so he moved the garden taps which were free standing and secured them to a fence post.  Then he added a length of pipe and another tap closer to the roses.  The roses don’t like to get their leaves wet so that end of the garden doesn’t get watered by the sprinklers and it has been a bother to disconnect a sprinkler and pull the hose over to the roses.  We sure like it when we can make things more efficient.

A new addition to the yard is a rain barrel at the corner of the garage.  They are very popular these days and hopefully, it will eliminate the water channels through the bark mulch during a big rainstorm.  We’ll have to wait and see how well it works as it filled completely when we had one downpour.

Our birdhouses are not working out well again this year.  We had a pair of chickadees that spent 3 or 4 days putting building material in the house and then they just disappeared.  We thought it was the swallows (very aggressive birds) that drove them away, but then the other day we saw the neighbour’s cat climb the fence post to get to the birdhouse.

We are going to hang one of the houses from a branch on our biggest tree and see if that is more successful. 

Stuart has been working on the boat, checking the wiring on all the gauges, installing a 12 volt outlet and he will be putting in a new sonar fish finder.  The old one worked okay but the black and white screen was scratched up, and you couldn’t read anything in the bright sunlight (we only go out in the boat when it is sunny.)  The new one should be much better; now we just need to get out on the lake and find the fish.