Gardeners' Holidays 2021: Spring Cleanup

For the first time I can remember, spring actually came right on time this year. After a couple of weeks of alternating cold and warm weather, today was a bright and sunny 60 degrees, with no more freezing spells in the forecast for the rest of the month.

Brian and I took advantage of the nice weather to head out to our favorite garden center to pick up half a yard of bulk mulch for our yard. There are several places in the yard that need it, but the top priority was the hill where the honeyberry bushes are. They're supposed to be mulched deeply at all times to deter weeds, but over the past year the slope has developed bare patches as the mulch layer has slid downhill over the slippery surface of the ground cloth underneath. But once we got the mulch home, we realized that if we simply started piling it on top of the same smooth surface on the same steep slope, it would probably slide off as well, leaving us back where we started. We had a few notions about how we might try to keep it in place — I thought laying some branches along the slope might work, and Brian thought we could use some of the netting we've bought to keep the birds off the berries — but the ideas weren't full-baked enough to put into effect right away.

So, for the time being, we decided to simply stash all the mulch in the shed. But in order to make room for it all, we had to pull out the patio furniture we'd stowed in there for the winter — and we couldn't simply set the furniture up on the patio, because it was currently home to a huge pile of branches we'd trimmed off our rosebush a few weeks ago. We couldn't just bundle those up and leave them at the curb like we normally do with brush, because we'd scratch ourselves to pieces on the thorns, so our plan was to burn them in our little outdoor fire pit. And since we clearly wouldn't be able to get any use out of our patio until that pile was gone, it seemed like this was the day to do it.

Initially, Brian tried simply chopping a few of the branches up and loading them into the fire pit with some newspaper as a starter, but that didn't get us very far. Since we'd only trimmed the branches off a few weeks ago, the wood was still too green to burn well on its own. So he went and fetched some better-seasoned wood from the shed, got a blaze going, and then started carefully feeding in the thorny branches piece by piece. They gave off a lot of smoke, but with the heat of the fire to help dry them out, they did eventually burn down, and over the course of a couple of hours the pile slowly diminished until there was nothing left but some stray leaves. And in the meantime, I busied myself about the yard, raking up dead leaves and pulling out stray bits of brush to add to the fire.

Mind you, the yard isn't completely tidy now by any means. There are still all the branches we pruned off the plum tree this month to be bundled, along with some evergreens left over from the holidays and a few more clumps of dead leaves here and there. We still need to pull some weeds out of the various garden beds and haul out and set up the rain barrel. And of course, all that mulch we just bought isn't going to lay itself. But at least we've taken the first step toward getting our outdoor living space set up to enjoy all this warm weather.

In fact, perhaps next time we fire up the outdoor fire pit, we might even be able to have a few friends over to enjoy it with us. After the long, cold, lonely winter we've had, that seems like as much excitement as we could possibly ask for.