Posted on Feb 25, 2017 12:36 PMYesterday I retired from a federal government job that I have worked at my whole adult life. I started on my 21st birthday and retired 34 years later on my 55th birthday. I have been waiting for this day for sooooooooo long. Decades of horrendous commuting and long hours left little time for anything else during the weekdays, so weekends were always precious. Even with the weekends, I just never seemed to have enough time to spend doing the things that I wanted to be doing and I was always tired. I feel like today is the first day of a very different kind of life and hopefully it will be everything I have been dreaming it could be.
The weather has been incredibly warm for winter and today, at the end of February, it is spring like. One of the things that I want to do is to spend hours every day in the garden. With the balmy weather, I wasted no time getting started this morning.
The first thing I did was to clean out the bird house. It is a multi family one, but for years a blue bird pair has been nesting in it. I always read that blue birds prefer a very specific type of bird house, and even though this one is nothing like that, they come. There are two tiers with 4 nest boxes on each tier, and the blue birds always nest on the bottom tier. I'm assuming it is a single pair that moves from nest box to nest box during the season with each brood they hatch - this winter there were 3 nests to clean out. I had to drag out the step ladder to get it down and then spent about an hour scrubbing everything with warm water and a sponge. All ready for spring!
I guess the best way to spend the days is to tackle one garden area at a time and work on it until my body is too sore to continue or I run out of daylight. I picked the turret foundation beds to start with. After months without physical activity, I only lasted for 3 hours before I had to quit.
I got the leaves raked out of the lower bed first and loaded in the bins I use to transport them to the compost area.
The snowdrops in that bed are in bloom. I was watching Monty Don in the 2016 Episode 1 of "A Gardener's World" on You Tube (thanks Annie!) and he recommended digging and dividing snowdrops while they are in bloom to create more swaths. All my snowdrops are in the far end of the bed, so I dug up about five clumps, divided them in half, and replanted in spots throughout the middle and front end of the bed. He said he does that once a year, and in time the swaths fill in nicely.
The hellebores in that bed are in bloom too, and even after trimming off the dead and damaged leaves they still look pretty ratty. There are two fairly nice sized plants, but the rest are still in their infancy. It usually takes at least four years for mine to start filling out. The nice sized white one always gets completely covered over when the sensitive ferns are up, so I decided to transplant it to a better spot. The sensitive ferns arrived on their own and have established a nice colony, but they are spreading rapidly. I bought some 10", maybe 12", flashing last year that I want to use as a barrier in the ground to stop the spreading of plants that I like but tend to take over. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. We'll see.
Rain and thunderstorms are predicted this afternoon, so the snowdrops and hellebores I transplanted should get a good soaking.
I walked one of the property trails this morning and combined with the hours of gardening work, I can already tell that my underused muscles are going to be sore. I took a bath with Epsom salt bubble bath and also took some Aleve, so hopefully it won't be too bad for doing more tomorrow!
