It's Mud Season

After yesterday’s most lovely 67° temps and today’s upper 50s, the top inch or two of soil has thawed and now we have mud. Lots of oozy, gooey mud. And boy do I know it, after having spent four hours working in the back yard. Every year I think the same thing—my yard will never be the same again—after tromping around in the freshly thawed topsoil. But, somehow, it always turns out okay.

This was the day I’d told the lad he was all mine. I needed him to move some things around for me and then help get rid of the wood crumbs in the driveway, left over from the new load of wood. Think in large terms. The wood crumbs are my least, least, least favorite part of the clean up effort after a wood delivery. And I’m usually challenged in figuring out where to put them. This year I asked the lad to build me a good sized compost bin. While he worked away at that, I raked and picked up a gazillion branches and twigs that landed in the back yard after the last two fierce wind storms. And I spent way too much time sorting through the wood crumbs to pick out a large barrel’s worth of kindling. I can never have too much kindling, but it’s a tedious task picking it out of the left overs.

The compost bin is more or less completed. I’ll have to stop at the hardware store in the next day or two for some chicken wire to line the bin’s front gate. Then all I’ll need are some green things to start tossing in on top of the wood crumbs. It’ll make some nice compost by the end of the season.

Now I’m ready to put lime and organic fertilizer on the lawn, while still thinking of ways to make the lawn smaller and the gardens bigger. I really take this quote to heart—A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. Some guy named Michael Pollan said it and I agree with him. Grass is a pain. It is always thirsty and hungry and practically requires brute force to make it behave. I want a couple of apple trees and more shrubbery and more vegetable plots and more flowers and more herbs. Plants that are perfectly happy to grow in their own space and generally happy with the water that nature provides. And if they’re growing in the same yard as the grass, that means less grass. Perfect.