April showers will bring May flowers, I hope.
Today is our second day of temperatures in the mid-80’s. Earlier in the week, I’d managed to rake up a lot of the garden area and today we raked the piles onto a tarp and dumped them toward the back of our property. Hopefully, the leaves will compost into soil and by the time we get around to working back that far they will not be leaves still, or less leaf like at least.
I noticed today that the azalea bushes are all filled with buds. We have three fairly big bushes. One on each side of the path to the shed. One between the two trees just in front of the house with the cement fake deer (don’t ask, it came with the house — they couldn’t move it). And a very small one we planted two years ago that is now a middling bush about 1-2 feet high. Two of the bushes have pink flowers and two are a more purple-ish color.
The peony trees also have buds. Seems that each year we get more buds than the year before. We’ve got two peony trees. We also have five peony bushes but only four of them are above the leaves — haven’t raked there yet. We dug around the leaves and the other bush has come up but is under the leaves. Tomorrow we hope to rake the leaves out of that area. I’ve uncovered all the strawberry plants and most of the perennial herb area. The lemon balm is sprouting up and the sage made it through the winter. Three of the lavender plants are also looking good. So, I’m really getting the spring fever to get things ready for the summer garden. Might even start some tomato seeds tomorrow.
On the down side, with the heat we discovered that the heat pump when switched to cool … doesn’t. So we’ve got the fans set up to move the basement’s cooler air up to the living areas. Got the ceiling fans going and the screen door open on the deck. It’s still warmer inside than out but livable. We had this problem last year and the heat pump/furnace thingy (original to the house, so very old) didn’t work and we got the very last part the company had available in this state and it worked the rest of the summer. A few months ago the heat part started going wonky but we have the wood stove so we didn’t mind too much and figured we could last another year if the cooling worked. So, guess now we’ll have to get estimates on getting a new furnace/heat pump which blows the budget to do some work on the basement (I was so hoping for walls and a ceiling down there). Oh, well. I do want AC before we hit the over 100 degree F days in Maryland.