Signs Of Spring!
I love Crocus' and this year is a double bonus because I have no goats to massacre them!
Yesterday, I spent six hours raking about a third of my rather large lawn. Lawn is probably not the right word. My yard is about two acres of grassy, forest floor. It kind of looks like a campground with random flower beds, a firepit, a pool, a greenhouse, and the ever-present Ponderosa Pine needles blanketing it all in a nice reddish-brown motif.
Twice a year I manually rake the entire thing. In the Spring the raking is a rite of Spring passage as the tines of my rake unearth the cold weather grass and this action helps me get back into what I like to call farm-fighting shape. There is nothing quite like raking 4-6 hours a day on top of all of one's other work to get one into "shape". More like pain. The soreness is real.
One of my favorite sayings is: I'm the Warren Buffet of pine needles.
You can make baskets out of pine needles, but honestly, I need time and artistic talent to do such a thing, and two of those items I don't have.
So, this evening I leave you with a rather brief post, as I need to go soak my sore carcass in a tub full of Epsom salt water. I hope the pictures of my emerging flowers bring a smile of impending Spring to your face as they do mine. Or you can always look at my insolent dog sticking his tongue out at me because I was lecturing him for putting his ball in one of my pine needle piles for the 657th time.
Chuck knows of no allegiance to any other than "the ball"
And as always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's pine needle covered iPhone.