Yard Day

Saturday was a beautiful day, sunny, mostly clear skies, no wind, with temperatures in the mid 50s - in short, a perfect day to get outside and do some work! It really felt good to get outside - it felt like spring! The crocus, anemone, and grape hyacinth bulbs that I brought with me are all coming up & budding in their pots. I can't wait to get them in the ground, but that's a ways off yet.

After breakfast, I started by picking up trash and construction debris that had blown into the bushes, it's amazing how much stuff I found! Paint can lids, caulk tubes, plastic packaging, cardboard... I filled the wheelbarrow in no time. But that was just a warm-up for the main event: removing the black plastic erosion control fencing (aka the "frog fence") from around the house and driveway. It was a bit difficult to get it out because the bottom of the plastic was buried in the dirt, and the grass had rooted through it, but the yard sure looks better now. On this side of the house, it's actually got grass!

The next thing was to dig out the gravel that had slid into the culvert outlet so that the water would flow through the ditch. The excavated gravel was handy for filling in some adjacent potholes. I love that sort of "two birds, one stone" thing. You can also see in this picture where the frog fencing was removed along the driveway .
For the grand finale, we cut up and brought in some more firewood from a windfallen alder across the creek from the house.
Cary cut it up into lengths, which I loaded it up into our trusty wheelbarrow. It was pretty hard to push the loaded wheelbarrow back through the long grass of the field to the road, so I had to take several trips with it half full. Still a whole lot better than carring it by the armload! Seriously, this wheelbarrow rocks - it's got two big fat wheels on it and a HUGE capacity. I don't know how we ever lived without it.
Here's Cary pushing the final wheelbarrow load back. I was tired!
Stacking the wood on the porch - the best part of the job! Can you beleive it, short sleeves in February? Like I said, it was a very nice day.
One really nice thing about cutting up windfallen snags like this for firewood is that they don't even need to be split, they can just be stacked as rounds. The other nice thing is that the wood is already pretty dry, since it was already dead when it fell. According to the long-term forcast, we're due for some more cold weather in the next few weeks. If that's the case, we'll be glad to have the firewood ready.