Spring is Springing 2007

It’s been nice (weather) of late, yesterday into the 70’s for highs, but then so are the pollen counts high, seeing as it’s early Spring here in the South, without the actual “Spring” of calendar being active, which is quite usual for the South, of course. It is warmer than usual for March though, and we are enjoying it, feeling the “planting” bug heavily.

We stopped by Home Depot yesterday to check out what trees and bushes they have. Today DH will be getting a crepemyrtle for our front yard, or so he said yesterday that he will today.

We had a proffessional landscape plan made up for our property several years ago, and we have been slowly implementing it, as well as tweaking some things (i.e. adding more thing of our own choice in addition to what’s on the plan, and changing a few things, then adapting the deletions back in sometimes in some way … 🙂 ) Yesterday I got that big sheet of paper out and we went over it in the house, then went out back and looked at things, then out front, and that is when we decided to check out what Home Depot has in stock (a new store in just the past year, quite near to us compared to how far we USED to have to go to one.)

We had been there for something else a few days ago, and quickly walked through the nursery section. I recalled that I was nearly certain they had the variety of Crepemyrtle that we have on our landscape plan. That name is “Muskogee” and indeed they do have it. It’s a beautiful variety, lavendar flowers and has a prolonged flowering period, 120 days (which is wonderful!) It’s also a fairly quick grower and has a really pretty brown-more-than-1-tone trunk. It’s a large tree, classified as a “medium” in the crepemyrtle family of trees.

There are many small plants we can install (when we get them,) that will aide in the building of how landscaped the front of the hous looks. We are hoping we can do a lot of that this Spring/Summer.

We want to demolish the sidewalk in front of our house and put in a paver (or something similar) walkway that is quite a different design, different placement. That will be expensive, and has to wait, but we might demolish the sidewalk and get the plantings there moved so we can get the “supposed to be there” plants in. We can put some cheaper stepping stones down in the grass for a walkway then, temporarily, if we want to.

I have Hosta to relocate, and some wild growing black berry plants (they are scraggly, but oh so tasty and sweet are the berries!) — the berries will go to the backyard, and we just got some cultivated Raspberry plants to go in that area as well, and will get more, and also will get blueberries for that area.

My Hosta I’m not sure what I’ll do with, it will be nice to relocate them eventually since they’ve really duplicated themselves, and I want to separate the two kinds, one is a lovely solid green/blue green, the other is varigated, green with white edges. Right now they are mixed up, and it’s worse and worse every year as they all multiply.

So then, the Yoshino Cherry trees in the front are readying their blossoms, they should open up in a week or less or more. In the backyard the Weeping Willow is greening up, so very pretty already. The tree behind our house is some sort of ornamental cherry and it’s wonderful already, the white blossoms are opening up and it’s not quite “peak” yet. Some of our Maples are blooming, nothing great, but a nice Spring sign which means leafing out is coming soon.

We have an Eastern Red Bud in the back of the backyard which put it’s first blossoms out last year, but not many. It’d been ruined when young, a previous dog of ours chewed it down to the stump. So I let it grow some, and pruned it a bit, then let it grow more and more for a few years, and last year those blossoms came, and after that, later Summer/Fall I pruned it more, maybe a couple of times in Summer too, to shape it better and get rid of icky branches and shoots, and what it there now is great. A nice tree growing and it’s full of blossoms readying for opening.

Our two other “mystery” trees near the Red Bud are also pruned nicely since last Fall, and look like little trees now. They are getting ready to do something, grow, but blossom, we aren’t sure. Never have either put out a blossom in previous years. It’s possible from the look of things they’ll do something more this Spring, and time will tell. I hope then I’ll be able to identify them sooner than later.

All the other stuff around is greening up too. It’s lovely, even though allergies eventually rear their ugly head for me. Thus far it’s not really an issue. I get an allegy alert email from, I think, pollen.com and I hope that it’ll be useful this year in naming a major allergy producer that will clue me in to it bothering me more than other things, like right now the pollen counts are High, but I’m not having trouble really, things listed are: Elm, Cedar/Juniper and Maple. FWIW.

We are talking about getting a pool put in this Summer too. Not an inground thing, just an decent above ground one with nothing elaborate about it. Costco is carrying one that we are interested in, and we’ll look into it more, maybe also check out a pool store. Being pregnant it’d be nice to have a pool for the last couple of months! I’ve always wished for one in such cases, when pregnant in this house (that’s two children) and I’m thrilled that Hubby is actually wanting one for any reason, not for me particularly, but it falls into my desires to get one. 🙂 We’ll see later if it’s do-able.

So we have sweat-equity we can use on our property to change things, and then the other things are going to cost $$$$, but it’s worth the investment what we want to do in planting, and then we have indoor things to do still, of course, which are well worth doing even more. We hope to get wood flooring by the end of March to get the upstairs hallway and bedrooms re-floored. 🙂 That will be awesome. Right now it’s not very nice in our room or the hallway, and what’s in the children’s bedrooms isn’t really great either.

So March is nice and warm and feeling productive thus far, and I know the weather will be cooler next week, but the 15-day outlook has it warming up again after that.