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.

Surely 4/8/04 to 4/24/08

"Surely goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life."

Our sweet, 4 year old Maine Coon, Surely, lost her battle with lymphoma today.
Surely -- You were a good kitty and we loved you lots! We all miss you. Rest well sweet one.

Emily Dickinson's Garden Week 3

On Monday I strolled over to Emily's garden, this time with my "grand-dog" in tow, as I was dog sitting for a couple of days. We've been having a heat wave here in Massachusetts....no joke..it is supposed to be 80 today and I am already having to water my garden! So, in the past week the plants have been growing like ... well... like weeds. Emily's garden has still not had its Spring cleaning. I am not sure what is up with that. Amherst College (which owns the Dickinson properties) has a gazillion grounds workers and wonderful landscaping. They must be focused on getting their campus ready for graduation weekend or something. If I wasn't so busy getting my own garden ready for the Tour, I would go over with my rake and do some guerrilla gardening. Have you heard of the global guerrilla gardeners' activities?


Well, I digress. In Emily's garden the magnolia was blooming, the tulips we brilliant and a large (cherry??) tree was in full bloom. In several places the foliage of Bleeding Hearts had gone from barely peeking out of the ground to about 8" tall in one week. This week is another hot one here so stay tuned for pictures of next week's Spring happenings at Emily's.