Greening Up!

It's been a while since I've posted, but the yard has been busy with growth over the last five weeks or so.  I've mowed the lawn once, and it's due for another mowing...tomorrow, if the weather allows.  The more natural areas of the yard have quickly sprouted up in the past couple of weeks, as you can see above and below.

Last month, I took some time to clear out some of the many raspberry plants here in the back of the yard, and it's a good thing, because now this patch is pretty densely packed with plant life.

You can see the raspberry canes that I've pulled up to the left in the photo above.

I've also cleared out a lot of the downed branches from this area, but there's still a big fallen tree there in the middle that I need to cut apart with a saw.

Many of the plants that have grown in this part of the yard are ferns.

Looking back across this same area from the opposite side, it doesn't look quite as dense...but the denser vegetation is there, toward the background.

Here's a look at that denser area of vegetation.  I think there's plenty of food here for the groundhog.

Along the side of the yard, the thorny plants have greened up as well.  I took some time to trim them back a bit before the leaves grew in, and I'm glad that I did.

This looks like a comfortable thicket for little critters to hide in.

But in the long run, I'm considering removing the thorny plants in favor of something that won't grow so aggressively.

In the center of the picture above is a big, overgrown thorny plant that I'm planning to take out or at least trim back.  It's actually several plants grown over the same area.

Flowers Popping Up

The planter boxes next to the patio have been pretty barren since I moved in, but now they're showing signs of life.  Small white flowers have popped up in the corner of one of these boxes, and so far the groundhog hasn't gotten to them.  Maybe they're too small to eat. 

As with most types of flowers, I don't know what kind they are.  But they were a nice surprise.  I have to keep my eyes open around the yard this time of year, or I miss little things like this.

Spring is Here!

Freeville and the greater Ithaca area is finally greening up.  First, the shrubs, and now the trees, are beginning to open up their leaves.

The flowering trees across the area are in bloom, the insects and birds are back, and spring is officially in the air!

Daffodils

One of the mysteries of moving into a new home is what lies underground...and, in the context of this post, what has been planted that won't pop up until spring.  Since I moved to Freeville in August, I've been wondering what, if anything, was planted in the garden.  I've already posted about the crocuses, and when I returned from Washington, DC about a week and a half ago, they had been joined by daffodils.

Now that I'm looking for them, I've seen daffodils all over the place: businesses, homes, the Cornell campus.

Cleaning Up Some Branches

As I pointed out during Looking Ahead Week, the first task of spring is cleaning up the fallen branches and unwanted plants from around the yard.  As you can see in the above photo, there are plenty of dead branches on, leaning against, and fallen below the trees.  In some places, especially around the area where I started the clean-up - that I'm discussing in this post - it was particularly ugly.

The simplest task was simply rounding up the branches that had fallen to the ground and piling them in another part of the yard so I can eventually take them to the county's yard waste collection center.  They accept branches up to 4" in diameter, so most of the branches in my yard can go, even some of the longer, larger ones.

I started this clean-up a couple of Sundays ago, when there was still plenty of snow on the ground.  In some places, it was hard to tell which branches were part of which organism, and whether it was living or dead.  Further complicating things, there were fallen branches sitting on top of or leaning over living ones.  It made for a rather jumbled situation:

The biggest pest seemed to be some vines that I had started to clear out back in the fall.  They're annoying buggers to get out of the ground, with long, straight roots.  The root of the vine below is the approximately foot-long dark brown segment in the center of the photo.

And amid the snow, grass and weeds below, you can see the thin, ropey, tangled vine that I had pulled off of the tree.  The vine grows right next to the tree, intertwining its branches with those of the tree.  As the vine gets thicker, it pulls the tree's branches down.

Here's a look at the trunks of a vine plant (left) and a tree (right) whose trunk is curved to avoid the vine's many branches.

And here's a view from farther out of the two plants.  Now you can see the many branches of the vine, low to the ground on the left, and the curved trunk of the tree on the right.  In the background is a thin, straight-trunked tree.

To end the post, here are a couple of before-and-after shots of the tree showing how much junk I was able to clear out around its base.  Of course, there's still more to clean up...there's a dangling branch that has mostly broken off, and there's the thick vine leaning up against the tree to remove.  But at least much of the rest of the mess is out of the way.

Since this initial clean-up effort, I've gotten back to the yard a couple more times to clear out some other sections.  More on that in the coming days.

Opening Up!

I guess we can say that spring has arrived.  The front yard was the place to be this morning, with birds feasting on bird seed, and in the flowerbed right in front of the house, the crocuses finally opened up this morning.  Now they just need some insects to do the pollinating...but it's still maybe a bit too cold for that.

One of these days - maybe this weekend - I'll have to get out there and pull out the weeds.  But it's good to see the yard slowly returning to life after a long winter.  Before long, the trees will be turning green, the wildflowers will start growing in, and the yard will be awash with color again.

Customers at the Birdfeeder

It's been an exciting morning in Freeville.  I got inordinately excited yesterday when a squirrel (above) tried to climb on the birdfeeder.  Finally, something out there had noticed it.

But the awareness of the feeder - which has been hanging in the same spot for two-and-a-half weeks - quickly spread beyond that one squirrel.  I opened my dining room curtains this morning to the spectacle of lots of small birds in the trees, testing out a new food source.

The first customer that I saw was a blue jay, sampling the seed that I had tossed on the ground, then flying up to the feeder and trying to snag some of the seed. He seemed a little too big for the feeder, though.

Other birds were a little more cautious, flitting over to the branch and taking a peek to see what was on offer.

The feeder is far enough away from the window that I had no idea what types of birds - like the goldfinch above - were out there.  It wasn't until I started going through these photos that I realized that there was such a variety!

The feeder makes a better perch for these smaller birds...I hope that they liked the mixed seed and come back for more, because I bought a 50 lb. bag!

These pictures don't really do justice to all of the activity that was going on...lots of chirping...lots of birds taking turns at the feeder, snagging a bite or two, and then quickly returning to the safety of the tree.

With the success of this bird feeder with its generic mixed bird seed today, I decided to move the thistle feeder to the front yard as well.  Now I just hope that I have company out my front window as I eat my breakfast every morning.

The First Flowers of Spring

The flowers in the flowerbed in front of the house don't seem to mind the cold temperatures and snow as much as we humans seem to. 

The flowers are popping up and hanging in there.  I don't know how many insects are around at this point to do their pollinating thing.

Not only are the leaves and stems coming up, but the crocuses are getting close to blooming.

I thought this guy might have opened up by the time I got home, but it looks like it will take another day or two.  Maybe tomorrow.

Spring Has Sprung!

You wouldn't know it by the coating of snow on the ground this morning (which had melted a bit by the time I got around to taking the above photo), and the cold, windy day we had today, but spring is well on its way here in Freeville. 

The weeds are growing in the flowerbeds in front of the house, just as they were from the time I moved in last summer, but they're now being joined by their long-hidden colleagues: flowers that I didn't know were there.  It may just be a sign of how truly unaware I've been of the world around me - though I try to stay alert to nature - but it was a pleasant surprise to look out my dining room window one day and see flowers well on their way!

I think at least a couple of varieties have been planted.  I'm no good at identifying flowers, but if I had to guess, I would say there are some tulips and a couple of crocuses slowly rising from the soil and wood chips.  Spring doesn't officially start until the vernal equinox next Wednesday, and we're looking at a cold few days up until then, but don't tell that to these guys!

I have no idea what's in store for me.  How big will they get?  What color will they be?  How long until they open up?  With the appearance of just a little bit of green, my life suddenly became just a little more fraught with anticipation and expectation.

Spring is a time for new beginnings, for fresh starts, and to me, it makes more sense as a time to make resolutions than New Year's.  I've recently been putting together project proposals for work, I've started to plan my overhaul of the garden and the yard, and the spring has me re-evaluating the blog as well.  How can I best capture, express, and share all of the wonders that my first year of caring for my own yard will bring, and all of the thoughts that go with it?

Like the flowers springing up in the flowerbed, I'm sure the yard will have plenty more surprises for me in the months to come, as this beautiful life-covered rock that I'm privileged to stand on responds to the growing sunlight and longer days, and like the leaves that will soon be unfolding on the branches all around me, I want to soak it all in.  I'm setting out to make my own little plot of the world, and my own little corner of the web, the best they can be over the coming months.  What about you?