Spring Time Chores

As we Northeasterners have been crawling out of our hibernation, spring slowly arrives. My spring flowers are now blooming. Spring came early this year for Upstate New York– i.e., no snow in April! Usually, we don’t allow those sporadic 70-80 degree days to fool us. We know a snowstorm could (and has) happened. But this year- nothing! What a treat! Still, most of April was chilly, and I balked at doing anything outdoors.

But now it’s May. And we’d better get going on the growing season or else nothing will be ready. Autumn’s frosts are just a few months away.

Lilac buds! At last!

And tulips! Beautiful!

The kids and I have a few projects set up for this year. For one, I have GOT to get my dining room, kitchen, and bathroom electrifed. *sigh* Even if I have to use conduit. I have been waiting until I can gut the walls to run electric wiring… there is NO WAY I’m going to snake wiring through these plaster-and-lathe walls. But right now, I still can’t gut the rooms (not unless I win a million bucks or something!). And I can’t have wires hanging all around us. So I may just grab some conduit and plug things in, until I can renovate. I’m not too pleased about this choice, but we’ve been without electric for almost two years now, and it’s getting kinda old.

We’re also enlarging our vegetable garden beds.

As you can see, we have two large beds surrounded by gravel. We used to have four beds, but it was impossible for me to maintain it. I was gardening more square footage than my house– too much for me! Well anyway, I surrounded the beds with gravel for a few reasons– to keep the zillions of weeds at bay, to help with drainage (our property has an underground stream and it is always soaking wet), and to retain heat (slightly increasing our growing season time). Now that the kids are older and can help with the gardens (plus, they eat a lot more!), we’re widening the beds. This means that they have to dig out a linear foot of gravel all around the beds. I will install new boards to enclose the beds and we will add more soil. Those old boards are 150 years old, having been taken from our attic floor for the garden, lol! Yeah, we sure do know how to recycle.

The extra gravel that we are getting from the garden will go toward our next project- a new drywell system on the other side of the house. Like I said, there’s a lot of water around here and we experience flooding in our basement. It’s gotten better since the my town cleared out a drainage pipe across the street, and since we installed a drywell on the other side of the house. You can read about our project here and here. The kids found a few old coins during their dig. This side of the house we’re going to conquer may reveal even more treasures, as this side of the house was traditionally the well and garbage heap.

So that’s all I have on my plate for this year. I work at home now, leaving me very little time to devote to renovations. I’m still hoping to renovate the whole house, but especially the kitchen, which has fallen apart (literally). More to come!