Happy St. Patrick's Day

The Mr. isn't fond of corned beef and cabbage and so we bought chocolate mint ice cream. It's green right? Anyway, we are just about as Irish as anyone can be so Happy Pat's to all!! Spring is just around the corner! More quilt squares as I continue with this pattern. Progress to follow.

As spring quickly approaches, we are forced to leave the inside construction and move our efforts to the yard. We have a monumental task ahead of us as we have half a block of lilacs in a hedge that has never been cleaned or pruned and we have about 6 to 8 large rose bushes that we need to move. Also on the removal list are several large juniper bushes that have grown to monumental proportions and we began today by starting with the lilacs and rototilling my first flower bed out back. I discovered a soaker hose along the lilacs that has been there so long that the grass grew over it. I have found tulips trying to grow through matted grass, and tulips that are actually managing to emerge from the previously frozen earth. We do have a few trees on the property that have survived without any water and need to re-plant where many did not survive. I have started my compost pile and we need to rent a chipper as the trimmings from the lilacs are piling up. Because the previous owners were obviously not concerned with the outside at all, the birds are unaccustomed to activity. After trying to identify a noise this morning, I spotted a woodpecker atop our metal chimney cover beating the ever lovin' daylights out of it with his beak. Doves sit on the light pole and watch my activities with curiosity and the finches who have just discovered my feeder (which hung out all winter), are extremely wary of me.

My sister and I went with a couple of older cousins on a drive in the countryside near our childhood home on Sunday. So much of the water is gone, sold to cities and newer subdivisions, which in decades past, watered crops such as sugar beets, corn, beans, etc. Fewer and fewer farms are left and our drive in the rural areas proved how dry and parched the previously fertile soil is. Sad. A cherry orchard used to stand on my uncle's farm and as a child I remember our family, aunts, uncles, cousins, all gathering to pick cherries. There is not one tree there now--not even a blade of grass. Small acreages replace the farms and many of them we noticed were abandoned and in foreclosure. From my earliest memories, I remember helping my father plant our garden every year. I have soil in my blood and I am anxious to get my hands in the dirt as soon as mother nature allows.

"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch their renewal of life--
this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do."--
--Charles Dudley Warner