A blog about a first-time house owner learning to maintain his backyard, and thoughts about nature, science, history, and life.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

As we flip the calendar to a fresh year, it's as good a time as any for me to stop and take stock of the blog...where it's been and where it will go in the future.  It started with a ton of ideas and lots of energy.  My first few posts were literally in the "picture is worth a thousand words" mode (go ahead and count), but this pace quickly proved unsustainable, and after the first couple of weeks of experimenting with different things, the blog settled into its current form.  The main threads of the blog include gardening and taking care of the yard; local history; a tour of the local area; and the weather.  I try to schedule the posts to go up at noon, but occasionally things go awry and they don't get up until later.

For 2013, I'm not planning anything substantially different in the format of the blog.  The rest of the winter will be heavy on posts about snow and cold.  In the coming weeks, I'll start doing some research for the garden and sharing that here.   I'm looking forward to meeting the village's historian later this month, and I'm hoping to be able to share stories of old and maybe even some old pictures to go with them.  The Freeville tour will continue when the weather is conducive to walking around outside, and later in the year, a new series will start that looks at the many natural areas around the county.  As the snow melts away and the days get longer, the blog will have much more garden content, and the history series may fade away for a while.

There's a lot to do in the garden and the yard in 2013.  The planter boxes in the garden, though snow-covered, are cleared of weeds and ready for plants in the spring.  I'll have to add some grass seed to the parts of the yard that have been torn up over the years.  I'm still in the process of clearing out some thorny plants, but what they'll make room for is still to be determined.  I need to do something with the wildflowers on the side of the yard; right now, they're being trampled by the deer.  I'm looking to make the yard an attractive place for birds, and I need to figure out what to plant - that won't be gobbled up by the deer within two weeks - to bring them over from the nature preserve across the creek.  I also need to find some plants to put in the planters in front of the house and next to the patio.  I'll be adding a weather station and will be better able to report on what's going on outside (jokes about looking out the window aside).

To close the post, I'd like to highlight five posts from 2012 on Acorn Place...in no particular order.  If you haven't seen them, I hope you enjoy!



First Post: Inevitability

Freeville History: What's in a Name?

Things Grow

Freeville Tour: Groton Avenue Park

Clearing the Weedy Garden: A Photo Series

No comments:

Post a Comment