Not that I should really complain.  It has been sunny and in the 70s the past couple of days, and in the 50s-60s before that.  I have been coming home from work and changing into shorts.  John and I broke out the bikes and went for a couple of rides around the neighborhood.  We opened the windows.  Last night we even talked briefly about turning on the A/C because it was so warm and stuffy upstairs.

(In Ohio.  In March.  Where in a normal year we would still have grey, slushy snow and temperatures in the 30s-40s.)

Perhaps this is the upside to global warming?

We have started to do some of the traditional springtime work of cleaning out the flowerbeds.

The ivy which I planted back when we bought the house in an attempt to get some ground cover started in the area around the crabapple tree has to go.  It has just been too aggressive in spreading and taking over other parts of the flowerbeds, the lawn, the end of the porch, and may even have been partially responsible for the decline of the tree’s health.  We pulled out a lot of it by the roots.

We also made use of a weed-burner, which is a nifty tool that John picked up some time ago.  Basically this is a flamethrower.  That you can use in your garden.  (Can you believe that you can just walk into a Home Depot and buy one of these things?)  It is… a whole lot of fun to use, but since it is an area effect item, you do have to be careful that you don’t torch things that you want to keep… like “good” plants, the porch, the deck, the garden shed, and drainpipes.  We managed to confine our fiery destruction to unwanted weeds and ground-cover and the aforementioned ivy.

This weekend we have yet more yard work planned, if the weather continues to cooperate.

Initially John wanted to either plant a new tree to replace the crabapple we pulled out last fall or edge the front flowerbeds.  I argued for doing both, since one is a very simple job (plopping a tree into an already existent hole and then dumping in a couple of bags of topsoil to fill it) while the other is somewhat more involved (digging a trench to define the border between lawn and flowerbed and then placing bricks in said trench and re-filling the gaps with dirt to hold everything in place)

I also would like to think about filling in some of the gaps on the front flowerbed that we created last week by pulling/burning out the ivy.

We will see how much we actually get done.  The forecast calls for continued warm weather and intermittent thunderstorms.