Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

It felt like spring this weekend and while I was at Lowes buying a new doormat I saw all the packaged bulbs and plants.

I couldn’t resist. I got a package of 5 stargazer lilies and two packaged peonies. I KNOW the darn things will be growing in the bags since they were in the store where it’s warm…. but it’s better to buy em now while the stuff is still alive.

Yesterday I was out digging holes. I planned to put the lilies out in my flower bed and the peonies up by the fence in front of the garage where we have another peony. So I started out digging one hole for the first peony. Not really that much digging… more digging the grass out and getting the rocks out. The dirt up in front of the garage… aside from the part we drive on… is WONDERFUL soil. Thick black dirt, not all clay… and not that many rocks, either. I love it when there aren’t a lot of rocks. The few I found I pitched through the fence to the cow pasture side. Ditto with the sod. But I dug up a huge piece of hinge… solid steel and pretty large. Plus a couple huge nails. Must be from the old farm that used to be here… the old farmhouse is in pieces slowly rotting away down at the bottom of the property.

Then I went over to my flower bed. I had Ron till up a strip a couple years ago… and he pried out a LOT of LARGE rocks. I added a few bags of good garden mix to it and planted brugsmansia and datura the first year. Last year I went with bags of clearanced glads. Tossed about 1/4 of what I bought, moldy or just dried up. I did have good glads last year, though. I ought to have better this year. I =thought= I was digging just outside of the strip and dug up some huge glad bulbs. Probably about 3x the size I planted. Great! I stuck em back in… hope I got em right side up, lol!

So I move over and dig some holes. It was a bit damp, but not muddy. I got a few lilies in and then went back to my peony hole to plant one of those. Surprise! Instead of just one peony in the package, I had two! Well, no problem, I’ll just put the extra one over in my flower bed. It can go where I had some sunflowers last year that didn’t get mulched. I stick my spading fork into the ground and pry… and up comes this whole yard of metal. Dig again and I get what looks like more of it. I’m not sure what it is… it looks like part of a rusted farm implement, something that would be dragged behind a tractor. What it’s doing under a fence and in between posts I don’t know. A bit of it had been sticking out, but I never tried to dig that deep last year in that spot. Good steel, just like the hinge piece… hardly rusted at all.

The trash that is at the bottom of the property is crazy… you can see pieces of roof with shingles. Old fridges laying on their sides with the doors hanging open… sheet metal… old pressure tanks from having to get well water out of the ground. Just lots of junk… and all covered over in summer with wild things growing and piles of brush getting tossed in. It’s actually great for wildlife.. the bits of roof make nice covers for animals that don’t actually dig burrows. Piles of brush left alone eventually break down and become dirt. We don’t really notice all that stuff in summer, it’s grown over. But winter… ugh. Could be worse, though… and I’m sure it would be if it didn’t have piles of old sticks and stuff thrown over it.

This is life in the country… and where no one outside of city limits had trash pick up until fairly recently. If you had the land… Just shove it over there, eventually it’ll rot away hopefully. Of course it doesn’t… My Mom’s property had trash pits all over it. When she had her pond dug, we were picking up plastic milk jugs for years. Plastic is forever. My Mom was good, though… she composts everything that can be, and then even before trash pick up would sort stuff out and save it up and haul it out to where the county would let rural customers take trash. Now she has trash pick up… she still composts. She does, however, still burn paper stuff. I’ve found that most people that live out in the country still do that. At least it’s just junk mail and cardboard from packaging… not trying to burn plastic milk jugs. That’s illegal here now, any burning of trash…. but I’ve also found that most people that live outside of town never heard about it. Probably the people that lived in town and had trash pick up voted on that, lol! There are the idiots still… people that don’t want to pay for trash pick up because they never have. They have DUMPS in their yards somewhere. Sometimes multiple dumps. Ugh!

It’s not nice digging up a bit of the yard for a flower bed and coming up with bits of old tin can and broken glass. Or pieces of old farm implements. From what we know, the previous owners of this property never had a vegetable garden…. too many rocks is what they said. That’s pretty unusual around here… everyone has a veggie garden, you did it because it was cheaper than buying food. If you had rocks… you picked them out, along with your children helping… because that is what people did. I’m still trying to find the old farm area where the garden was, though, lol! Ron did his picking up of rocks… he says that he thought he was going to end up with another pond. If you saw the pile of rocks you would understand. It’s HUGE. Perhaps the garden area was that section over where the peony is… NICE dirt. There is always a spot somewhere on an old farmstead where the dirt is good.

Anyhow. Today it rained most of the day and watered in all my new stuff. Now it’s going to flurry and then freeze again. Hope the peonies survive. Hope my new grapes survive. If not… well…we’ll see.

hugs,
Vyx

2 Responses to “No photos, no jam… but it’s getting close to spring”