✍️ Lilly
Spring announced itself with bright colors. A blue sea of scilla dappled with crocus followed by bright orange tulips that had spent the past years silently multiplying. The bulbs I put in the ground before winter started to wake up. I hadn’t made a specific planting scheme so every flower was a new surprise.
As the sun came up higher and stayed out later it was time to start preparing for our first year in the garden.
The big cherry tree we used to climb as children had sadly died and was nothing more than a corpse looming over what is to become the first part of the vegetable garden.
In April we started setting up raised beds and filled them with soil. I stuffed wood chips and branches in the very bottom and then topped it with 2 trailers of compost from our local recycling plant. I sowed the first seeds, radishes and spring-onions.
Temperatures started to climb and the first seeds were sprouting and we ordered strawberry plants.
We had held out hope that the cherry tree would still have some life in it but after discovering decay on one of the main roots peaking out of the soil we knew it’s time was up so down it had to come.
May 7th:
My partner and I are both very hands-on, spontaneous and stubborn which were necessary traits for this job. Within a couple hours of noticing the rot we had whipped out the little extendable electric chainsaw from my parents we had been using all of autumn and starting cutting back branches. We made quick work of cutting down and dividing the branches into manageable piles. After all, we had ALOT of practice by now. Again, smaller branches were shredded and the rest chopped for firewood for my parents house.
We worked from the outer branches in. I climbed to the top of the tree to reach some of the higher branches. As we got to the thicker ones the same started to struggle. My dad came by with 2 larger chainsaws but neither started… As my dad took apart the saws and tried to get them to work we kept at it with the small saw. It was slow and tedious but eventually we got it down to just the trunk.
After some more hours of chopping we were able to push and pull the trunk and get the tree down within the day. Now the real heavy work was about to start. I started digging around the trunk of the tree, revealing 3 huge, yet very surface roots. We borrowed and sharpened my parents axe and between digging around the roots and axeing until our callouses turned to blisters we were able to piece by piece get the roots and eventually the trunk out of the ground.
FINALLY! It took many days of hard sweaty work in the hot spring sun but we finally had a huge hole in the grass and could keep working on our new projects.
Being the person I am I was obviously going to take this opportunity to make a flowerbed out of this already cleared area. (Post to come)
With this massive task complete and finally being out of frost risk I could give more attention to creating new beautiful areas in the garden.
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