After a month of no rain and no energy on my part the yard looks terrible. My husband has either been working or had plans every weekend so he hasn’t been much help either. So, even with my 6 month pregnant belly I decided to tackle some much needed yard clean up tasks.
We have an apple tree in the backyard that until this year I was sure would never produce much fruit to speak of. Well, it must have gotten enough rain to produce some very nice, medium sized, sweet-sour apples that will be great in pie. The only problem is that many of the apples have fallen into the yard and started to rot. Our back yard was starting to smell like an apple cider vinegar factory and look like a compost heap. I used a garden rake with tines pointed up and a snow shovel as my “broom and dust pan” to pick up the fallen apples. It worked pretty well. I dumped them in a wheelbarrow and carted them over to my actual compost bin. There was one bag of composted manure left from earlier in the season that got dumped on top of them to keep my layering consistant. I don’t want the compost bin to reek.
Then it was time to tackle some mowing. It would take forever to push mow our lawn so even though I ended up in some pain from the jarring of the mower last time I tried it again anyway. Surprisingly, it vibrations and jarring didn’t hurt me as bad this time and I was able to get the front yard and a small portion of the back yard mowed. Then I realized one of the small front tires on the mower had gone completely flat. OOoops! God only knows when I must have run over, but that ended that. Tomorrow I’ll look into what I need to do to fix it. Blah!
So my tasks for tomorrow and probably the rest of the week will be to finish mowing the lawn – back yard and side yard, pull weeds (this could take a long while), clean up the garden, and possibly plant some cold hardy crops. I need to get some knee pads for this weed pulling work. My little foam mat is OK but I have so much area to cover it’s a pain to have to move it every 18″.
If you have any suggestions about what quick growing cold hardy crops would be good for zone 5a please leave a comment.
Happy Gardening (and cleaning up 🙂 )
Firstly, I’m a mom and wife. Professionally, IT consulting is my job and blogging is the outlet for my passions. I write about things that affect the everyday life of a stay-at-home parent or any parent for that matter such as parenting, relationships, discipline, the media, product reviews, giveaways, social media, food, cooking, gardening and anything else that might come my way.
