Easter!!!

Yep, the Easter bunny (or should I say Easter lamb) came to our house!  And to the whole earth, in spite of Covid19.  

The pink blossoms were from a morning walk.  The white blossoms are our apple tree.  You can see from the first picture the purplish stuff growing around the base of the trunk - it is called hensbit and I have been gradually digging it up and putting grass seed in its place.  I have about a four-foot square patch left to tackle.  We had a frost one night last week and so, once again, Steve and I covered all our blossoming fruit trees with sheets.  However, since their radical pruning earlier this year, it wasn't such a difficult job..... the ones below are the apple trees and you can see where the new grass has been planted...

These are the cherry trees in the front yard the next morning and happily, all the blossoms survived the frost (although some of them didn't survive the sheets!  😒)

We sold our Mantis tiller on Friday through Facebook marketplace.  It was a finicky and annoying little machine from day one and so we hardly ever used it.  Since we don't plan to have a huge garden in St. Louis,  why keep it?  We are still trying to sell the chainsaw - our prospective buyer was a no call/no show yesterday.  Gas powered engines are a pain so we plan to buy an electric chainsaw with the profits of this sale.

Friday, Steve and I tackled the kitchen cabinets.  He removed and replaced hardware and I scrubbed off grime and glop.  These cabinets are odd in that they have two holes.  That would make one think that they were made for a handle.  But, they are so close together that there is not a handle anywhere that would work.  So, instead, a backplate was used to cover one of the holes and a knob was screwed in through the backplate hole.  It worked but it also looked dated.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do to solve the problem but I bought a set of 25 black knobs anyway.  And, then on Friday, in a flash of inspiration, I decided to screw knobs into both holes and "ta da"!  With the addition of five new drawer pulls, I really like the results.

 

I spent yesterday in the yard - digging up the hensbit around the apple tree and trying to get the part of our front yard into shape where the piers were placed.  The big machines kind of mixed up the good top soil with the icky clay soil and just plumped it all down in lumps when they finished.  Look up by the house especially.  And, by the sidewalk, the dirt made mud puddles every time it rained.  What I want is a slope of grass going down and away from the house and the driveway.  You can see small patches of grass trying to grow from the trauma it suffered in December.

BEFORE

It is kind of hard to tell but I leveled off the dirt up by the house and dug away the dirt by the sidewalk yesterday.  We have piles of good dirt in the backyard that were surrounded by the landscape brick I sold a couple of weeks ago. This coming week, Steve and I will haul that dirt to this front area and then plant grass seed. 

AFTER 

We have watched a lot of television - Steven came over on Tuesday and introduced us to the first three episodes of the Mandalorian and we finished up Season 1 of Picard yesterday.  We watched the live action Beauty and the Beast on Friday night and Star Trek Nemesis last night (tying in with Picard)  

I will close with a yard sign found in our neighborhood....