Work, Slave, Work.

5-17-07 VERMONT: I came up yesterday. In Massachusetts in was in the eighties, but in VT a front came through and it dropped to 50°. When I arrived the Invisible Fence was broken, the phones were dead, and the TV didn’t work. Today everything is fixed.

I cleaned up the winter dead fall including some pretty big branches, started putting out the flower bed guards, took down the reflectors for the snow plowers, hung the pasture gate, weeded, raked up the driveway graved plowed into the yard with the snow, and a bunch of other chores. The mallard ducks were on the pond twice today, but the dogs chased them away. I saw a scarlet tanager in the pasture. The frog opera is in full voice.

In bloom: first apple tree, service berry, forsythia, star magnolia, judd viburnum, elderberry, forget-me-not, trillium, bleeding heart, pulmonaria, virginia blue bells, violets, wild strawberry, pachysandra, vinca minor, epimedium, wild ginger, jill-over-the-ground, jack-in-the-pulpit, primrose, daffodil, alkanet, bergenia, clatonia, foam flower and dandelion.

5-18-07 VERMONT: Another work day. I finished the bed guards, an unpleasant chore. Every year I think about not using them, they’re a nuisance to put out and then take up in the fall, but while I was thinking about it, Sam dug a hole under a hydrangea. The guards went up. In the afternoon I set up the veggie garden. I filled holes with manure from the barn run-in, weeded, re-layed the black plastic weed barrier that had been blown off the bed and replaced the parts that were shredded and stapled it all down. Then I put up the posts for the electric fence and then wired it up, and then it was time for dinner. One of the neighbor’s cats came for a visit while I was doing the veggie bed and she [?] had a stare down with Chloe and then vanished.

New birds: rose-breasted grossbeak, gold finch, nuthatch.