Bushes, Birthdays and Birdies

During a break in the ice age we've been experiencing we planted two cherry and a current bush in the as-yet-to-be-completed side yard. Weeks ago we dug up the grass and purchased stepping stones and brick for a pathway which are still neatly stacked and waiting. I am anticipating cherry pie, cherry muffins, and and hoping drying currents will be more successful than the cranberries we dried a few years ago that exploded into powder if you pressed them.

We now have a minimum of seven projects in various stages of completion. For
whatever reason, when it became too cold, muddy and miserable to work on the stone path, instead completing one of those unfinished projects, Dean decided he'd rather begin another one and pulled up the landscaping timbers in front of our raspberries. Apparently he's finally gotten tired of digging up raspberry shoots from the lawn and thinks lawn edging will work better. Two weeks later he got around to digging a narrow trench for the edging. A couple of hours after that he came inside moping and sighing because he found roots deeper than his eight-inch edging. So now comes the "thinking" stage, and one more unfinished project.

One project we have managed to complete from start to finish is a new strawberry bed. We happened to be visiting Leslie and Ryan one day when Ryan was digging up ground to make a sandbox for the kids. I couldn't resist the black rich-looking dirt he'd dug out and since Ryan had no plans for it we went home with buckets of awesome dirt in our trunk. If I would have thought things through clearly I would have remembered I live with a crazy man and thought twice about asking for it. When we first moved to this house Dean made us dig up all the rocks under our gigantic deck, dump them bucketful by bucketful into a sieve he'd made with a 1/4-inch grated bottom and then wash them before they could be put back under the deck. It wasn't a day project or even a week project. It was a summer project which only Dean seemed to enjoy.

This dirt not only had to be sifted through the same homemade grate but had to be sorted. Dirt fell below, rocks went in one bucket and and grass, leaves, etc. into another for compost. Those strawberries better be happy.

Pierce celebrated his second birthday at the cabin Ryan's parents have on the mountain. Leslie made an awesome race car birthday cake which was much more impressive than the birthday cake I made one year when she told me, "it's not very good, Mom, but I know you tried".



We roasted hotdogs over a fire,

Pierce learned to shoot an arrow,

Emerson collected flowers for her hair,

and Myra made sand soup.

We saw some interesting plant life while we were up there too.




We have been watching as one industrious young couple built a house under our deck and then proceeded to successfully raise their young.






At least somebody is able to finish a project!

◦

Bushes, Birthdays and Birdies