We're home! OK, summer home, Shafer. It's been nearly 2 years, and we've been greeted by an amazingly clean house... and a Minnesota-style jungle. Still, we took the time to recover from the trip with three days of a lot of sleep. It was easy: just quit the coffee.
Paul has been making jellies from the stuff planted in the yard decades ago now. Jars of various kinds are laid out over the dining room table, ready for distribution. My job, of course. He assures me more frozen fruit is filling the two basement freezers. I gather from that information that he doesn't intend to be overly ambitious about picking fruit this summer. Which is just as well. Because the other thing that hasn't been happening is pruning.
The birch are overpowering the driveway. Two large ridges show where tree roots are pushing up beneath it. Hearty trees, there, those river birch. The paper birch aren't doing quite so well on the other side, but both clumps have one thing in common. No matter how high we trim branches back, they spread out, hang down, and in a month or so will be scraping car tops. Mind you, both cars are compacts, and the trees have been pruned up to a spot along their trunks where I can no longer reach. They'll be quite a job.
The front yard's two cherry trees have always been pruned where one is fairly short and reachable, the other requiring a ladder for fruit picking. Other front yard short bushes have sprung up high, lacking the pruning needed to keep them compact. Euonymus - aka burning bush - stand out - literally, covering the front windows rather than bushing up about 4 feet. The ones on the side yard have either died and been replaced by some other growth, or just died back and have lots of bushy new growth on the bottom. I haven't investigated yet. They're on a hill sloping from the raised driveway down to the neighbor's yard, making interesting footing. It's been filled with double-blossom orange daylilies, brought in from the St. Paul duplex my folks sold about the same time this house was built, guaranteed to fill in as groundcover eliminating any need to mow. Nobody said anything about the "small" trees springing up in that patch under the birch. I cleared it two years ago but....
The north side of the house has been taken over by large ferns, along with the few young weed trees even they couldn't choke out. Some are likely amur maples, a wonderful idea for fall color until we discovered that nobody warned us about the million seeds each of the two we planted would produce each year. Those parents are gone, along with their robin nests; their great grandchildren an ever-renewing problem.
The huge sugar maple in the SE corner is still that, but getting near the trunk will be a chore. It's surrounded by 6 foot bushes. Perhaps the lilacs behind it on the property line, or the wild rose, or offspring of the tree itself have filled it in. Other likely culprits are gooseberries or box elders or ash seeds spread on wind or by birds. Underneath are supposed to be many varieties of daylilies, crocus and daffodils, with a lining of hostas. Everything but the tree needs attention in that spot.
Out the dining window I can see two far high bush cranberries blooming, and closer in along the same fence enclosing the back yard are lots of dead twigs, undergrowth starting. Another week's project. Before moving south I have pictures of cardinals, robins, and cedar waxwings coming in and gobbling all the fruits up that we ignored. Pink blooming honeysuckle are doing their thing... 20 feet up. Another major chop job.
I have started work in the back yard. I had to. Heather Too had to be able to get down the ramp to get into the yard. And I had to cut back the chokecherry bushes growing over and through the ramp, precluding access by either of us. That was my first night's chop, followed by sweeping out accumulated leaves making the ramp slick, and piling branches near the woodpile ready to dry out for summer bonfires - or homes for the chipmunks which have finally discovered the hazelnut hedge and two acorn-producing swamp white oak along the back fence. The wood pile lay in a line between the original chokecherry trees, helping keep some of the weed brush down there. Before you can get to them to add branches - the kindling pile - you have to dodge the grape arbor - in predictable condition - two huge dense apple trees, essentially unharvestable, and several red currant bushes. Since the currents are along the fence behind the apples, I haven't down more than a glance in their direction yet.
Way back along the back fence, after the hazelnuts and acorns, sits the tool shed. Past it, memory says there is a huge elderberry bush. Memory also says it would repeatedly die out in one spot after a couple years and spring up in another. No telling where that might be now, although the window well put in for basement egress has been blocked by some elderberry offspring for over a decade. Hey, nobody burn the house down, you hear? It'll get taken out, and the stepped retaining blocks will again reveal variegated hostas, tiger lilies (I hope), and humongous cup flowers. Meanwhile, along the back fence, elderberries or no, there are six huge white birch, tallest trees in that part of the neighborhood, a dogwood run amok, and a red maple. Whatever else is there is coming out. By summer's end. Low priority, after all, because, garden.
What, this didn't sound like a garden to you? Well, there is a formal fenced garden. The middle of it is where all the grass clippings get dumped, year after year, letting nature turn them into compost. On the south side, a few mammoth raspberries were planted 30 years ago. Right now it's a tree farm. Again, years of no pruning. Since this year will be little harvesting, I've gotten Paul to agree to my taking everything back down to the ground. We'll kill the trees, let the new raspberry canes come back up for next year's harvest. The bird boxes on metal posts will be evaluated for suitability for either tree swallows or bluebirds, their former occupants, well, as well as wrens and tree frogs, and possibly replaced. Along the back side of that same garden raspberries have invaded, so some will be harvested for eating this summer. I think in fall we can cut everything to the ground there as well and for the same reasons. Thistles run rampant there, and we're talking those nasty Canadian ones, not just the sow thistles I can pluck by bare hand. More (careful) spraying.
In front of that raspberry garden is part of the remains of my fish ponds from years past. As a hobby, Paul and I kept and bred tropical and cold water fish, expanding with koi and goldfish out into yard ponds. These two smaller ones - one dropping into the other - first held lotus and tadpoles. We supplied just the lotus. After a couple years we let the lotus die and replaced them with hardy-enough water lilies. More ecosystem-friendly natives appeared, including yellow iris, a true weed except for the couple weeks they bloomed. Their fate is to be determined. A larger pond next to the house, under the picture window, held the bigger fish and more water lilies. We tried papyrus one season, water hyacinth several others when we were breeding fish. It has now gotten holed, drained, and filled in with grass clippings and whatever else needs to be buried somewhere. (Not the pets. They still get the middle of the raspberry patch.) Think rocks, chunks of concrete, etc.
Between the large pond and the picture window are red blooming wigelia, and everblooming short gold daylilies. I know the bushes remain, needing remedial pruning, but no clue if any of the daylilies have survived the fern incursion. Spraying those never worked, and some time during the lst 30 years we quit trying. I think I saw box elder though.
Finishing the fence line up to the house, the yard fence, not the raspberry fence, are whatever remains of another experiment, something like juneberries but not exactly. Another low priority job. Between those chokecherries along the ramp I first mentioned and the corner of the fence are the remains of a couple vines I planted so long ago I forget their names too, natives with fall red leaves and blue berries, plus a couple bushes of something variegated, also with name recognition issues. Anyway, the ferns have invaded that space, and since they don't require mowing, no biggie there.
In various patches in the yard different cherry bushes have been planted. Some bush variety went in a patch where apricots survived but made lousy fruit: yank! Nankings survived for many years, but I suspect they are gone. Paul put in a different kind where those were, and two years ago I chopped out a bunch of invading box elders. Those are back, due for chopping and stump poisoning.
This leaves the front flower garden. It's in an "L" shape, along the driveway and house front. Lily of the valley has been taking over, and I regret that we arrived just after the blooms dried up leaving no fragrance behind. We'll have to see what's left of bearded iris, a bulb clump iris (name issues again - dutch maybe?), Alaskan white daisies, shasta daisies, liatris, butterfly bush, milkweed, coneflowers, brown eyed susans, and balloon flower plants. I can see red columbine flowering in a couple spots, and parts of the hosta border along the driveway, with lots of grass, baby maples and box elders competing with the lily of the valley to choke out everything.
Paul assured me that the earliest of the spring bloomers are still doing well here. This means snowflowers, crocus in 4 colors, scilla, daffodils though not in all the 50 varieties once here, and tulips.The lawn is blue with scilla as soon as snow is gone, and later purple with violets. Some of those still cover the ground where he didn't get a chance to mow before we arrived. Dandelions will be filling in any day. Neighbors complain, but....
The final stretch along the house, the south side, is/was a blueberry patch. I know better than to expect the roses to have survived untended. Pretty doubtful about the blueberries too, but I haven't had the heart to go check yet. There's just so much to keep me busy already. I just have to convince both my shoulders to ignore their rotator cuff issues. I need some exercise. The yard needs some hope again. I need something resembling a legacy out there.
Coffee anyone?
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