It has been a while since I wrote a particularly long blog post, and that is because I have been fairly busy enjoying the Regina spring. There has been much gardening, some barbecuing, and excursions to events like the Cathedral Arts Festival. I also had to make a very short (40-hour) trip to Portland, which ended up being fun but exhausting.
I hope to write a more substantive blog post this coming weekend, but for now I want to let people know that we will be in Oregon from the evening of June 12 through the end of June. We are road tripping, and will be traveling back and forth between Eugene and Portland and hopefully visiting other wonderful Oregon places. If you will be in Oregon during that time, send me an email and hopefully we can work out some visiting!
And, in the meantime, here are some pictures of Portland friends and their adorable babies to distract you:
They say that when the cat's away the mice play, and this mouse has been playing nonstop in the dirt – lots of gardening and yard work. As soon as the snow melted, massive amounts of weeds appeared, and I have been extracting these weeds in preparation for new planting. I am waiting for Jeff to come home (tomorrow) to actually do the planting, because I am still not that great with a shovel – it takes a great deal of balance to be able to stand on one foot while using the other foot to pound a shovel into the ground, and I am not quite there yet. However, I have discovered that I am very good with a hori-hori knife.
Yesterday at the garden center I purchased seeds and seed potatoes, four haskap bushes in one gallon pots, three bags of compost, and some fertilizer. All I need now is someone good at digging holes, and the garden is a go :-)
Jeff and I have spent the past week working on transforming our backyard. Admittedly, Jeff has done most of the hard labor, but I have been out there doing what I can. Unfortunately, I have realized that we have no "before" pictures of the backyard, so the "after" pictures will not be nearly as dramatic as they should be. Some of the transformation happened last year – converting the sandbox into a garden bed, removing aggressive vines from our back fence, and having some sad pathetic little trees and old stumps removed last fall.
At the beginning of spring this year, we still had an unusable back corner of our yard that was filled with piles of dirt, wood, random pipes, huge rocks (once used decoratively in garden beds I'm sure), and concrete blocks. We also had a chin up bar in front of the garden, and a section of chain-link fence that was jutting out from the main fence for no apparent reason. This weekend we accomplished some major tasks related to our backyard makeover.
First, we got rid of the chin up bar, though not before Jeff used it for the first and last time:
The remains of the chin up bar
I had already removed most of the useless section of fence, but the post was still left and we got rid of that too (also seen in the above picture). Several days over the past week were spent removing junk from the unusable back corner of the yard (saving and repurposing what we could) and then spreading out the dirt to make a flat usable space.
Next on the agenda was tree planting. Having gotten rid of several useless trees (a "volunteer" elm tree in the land of Dutch Elm disease, some unhealthy lilacs that had stopped flowering, and a spindly little willow that would not stand up to the wind), we planted four new ones that we actually wanted: an apple tree and three cherry trees/bushes. Here in Saskatchewan cherries don't grow on proper trees, but there are sweet varieties of sour cherries (a seeming contradiction) that grow on trees that are more like bushes, growing to only about 6 feet high. Today Jeff did lots of digging, making holes for our transplants.
It's hard to see, but that's a really big hole just to the left of the tools on the ground
After planting, there was dirt spreading to do:
A lot of hard work, but worth it for the new view from our windows:
When the trees start to leaf out, and the grass gets greener, and the garden is planted and growing, it will be much more impressive. We also have a few more improvements that we hope to make, and there will be more pictures when we are done!
st
k
ng) 
) 
