And I’m Just Finally Getting Rid of the Last of the Fall Leaves

Wow. It’s already spring. Sort of.

Officially, the last “average” freeze date for Waco is March 12. We’ve had freezes ‘way into April, but that’s unusual, and I’m impatient. Also, I don’t usually plant really tender things. (I did buy a bougainvillea last week, and it will need to come into the house if the temperature plummets in the next few weeks.)

I’ve talked before about fall raking, and other yard stuff.  There were lots of leaves, and I raked all of them up. Most of them went into big black trash bags, because the green bins that hold yard waste are only emptied every other week on trash day, so there’s a limit to how many leaves can get carted away to be mulched. I put all those extra leaves in those trash bags. Every other week, in addition to whatever weeds and sticks and things that have been damaged by the few frosts we’ve had,  I emptied one or more of those black bags into the green bins. Every other week, through the fall and winter.

This Thursday, after a rather epic rainfall the day before, I thought  I could probably get the last of the bags of leaves emptied into the green bins.

And now, behind the shed, there are ten bags of dirt to spread around in the low places at the back of the yard. They’d been in the car’s trunk for a while. I’d gotten them at a local nursery and hadn’t taken the time to move them. Today, with that space behind the shed now empty, I thought I should transfer them. I’m not all that strong, so it was a one-at-a-time situation. I got the wheelbarrow out of the shed, pushed it up to the garage, opened up the car’s trunk, and pulled and tugged at one of the bags. I got it out of the trunk and into the wheelbarrow, and wheeled it across the back yard and around to the back of the shed, and dumped the 40-pound sack onto the ground. Then, I pushed the empty barrow back up to the garage, and so on. At this point, all ten bags are behind the shed, waiting for a warm day when things have dried up a bit after the several rainy days we’ve had.

Just this week, several trees have begun leafing out. There are trees with the mistiness of new leaves around them, and a tree that produces purple flowers before the leaves pop out is shimmering with beauty. The trees in my yard are still bare, with leaves that appear later than some others. But it won’t be long.