Back to Work!

We are home from Quebec and back to work on the yard & garden (and yes...our "real" jobs as well). The Amherst Garden Tour is in 2 weeks. Yikes!! I finished staining all 175 (+/-) pickets today. What a tedious job. Tomorrow I hope we will get most of the fence up. Stay tuned for more pictures of the fence in the days to come. With all the hot weather the plants are weeks ahead of schedule. I hope there is still something blooming the day of the tour.

Ohh...but, before I go!!!

Oh..but before I leave...Let me share a picture of our big stump removal event. We had a huge old apple tree right in the middle of the back yard that was very tall but had hardly any branches and only a few leaves on one section. Branches were falling to the ground and hitting our deck.....so as you saw below, we finally had to take it down. Then Tuesday the stump removal guy came and ground up the remaining 4' tall and 45 " diameter (at the base) trunk and roots down to 12" below grade. I have never seen this done before. It was very noisy and quite impressive.

Do you like my magnificent Fringe Tree in the background? It sends its amazing fragrance all over the neighborhood this time of year.

Off to Quebec

Just enough time for a quick post.
We're headed up to Montreal for the wedding of our friends Chris & Nathalie and then to Old Quebec. Will post about the trip and more house & garden happenings when I return. Have a good week!

More Progress

This past week we made significant progress on many fronts! More scraping & painting has brought us to the point of 2 sides being almost all primed.
We also custom cut the fence pickets at our friend Jeremy's studio -- Jeremy is pictured here helping us get it set up. It took us 3 night sessions to get all 160 of them cut - a 6 step process.
















And here it is as we began installing it today (it will get a second coat of solid, white stain, after it is all up). We have 2 sections out of 12 done.































Also this week, son-in-law Ben came and helped us cut down a huge old and mostly dead apple tree.








Then our son, Aaron came the next day and cut it all up.






I also got quite a few of the annuals planted. I use these to fill in empty spaces and add height & depth to some areas. In addition, I planted 16 large pots. Pictures of those soon to come - they don't look like much right yet.

It's Coming Along

Slowly but surely, things at Sweetside are changing!

Catching Up!!

Oh my...the past few weeks have just flown by. It 's the end of the semester and teaching 5 courses has meant that my days have been packed with classes, meetings, and of course..the dreaded grading. I've barely read any blogs in the past 3+ weeks and as you can see I have not posted either. There is so much to catch up on and of course many garden blooms have come and some have gone by already. I have found a few pockets of time here and there to work on the garden a bit but I am behind where I wanted to be at this point I hope to do a lot of catching up these next few weeks before the Tour. Many things are started...but... it all needs to be finished! The new picket fence is underway...most of the posts are now in place. The house is power washed and we have just begun scraping and priming (see blue/grey on left side of window, above). The new pea stone paths out back have also been started. We had the UMass Engineers Without Boarders group come as part of their fund raiser for the upcoming Amazon Project and they helped with the fence and hauled a lot of pea stone for us (third pic). Yeah!!

For my Emily's Garden readers.... I apologize and promise I will post more Dickinson garden pictures very soon!

Grief Work

After losing our sweet kitty Surely last week, our labors in the yard became a good form of grief work, helping to pass those initial days of missing her. Baird worked on putting in the fence posts for our new picket fence which will go around the south side garden that is abutted by sidewalk on 2 sides. I did various clean up projects and helped him with the fence posts a bit. On Friday I took the day off and tackled the picnic table, sanding it and re-staining it colony grey. We have a long way to go in the next 7 weeks for the Tour but, I think we've made a good start.