The morning brought the sunshine, and it was a welcome sight. It was 5C this morning, when I opened the kitchen curtains to peer out at the thermometer. The day slowly warmed, and by mid afternoon it was quite pleasant.
The municipality where we live conducts a spring yard waste pickup. It will take place this week. During the winter a large branch of the Crabapple Tree in the front yard snapped off and lay suspended in the remaining tree branches. Today Attila took his tree saw and removed branches from it, until it fell to the ground. Then the cleanup began, which took all morning. Finally all the branches were bundled, the twigs gathered up and bagged in paper yard waste bags, and it was all piled at the end of the driveway, ready for yard waste pickup.
Looking out into the sunny back yard this morning, hundreds and hundreds of bright yellow dandelion blooms smiled right back at me. We have neighbours on three sides of us, and they don’t have dandelions in their lawns, which means they are using chemicals of some kind. I don’t want to use chemicals on our lawn. We have had the place for almost six years now, and not a drop of chemical fertilizer, insecticide, or herbicide, has come anywhere near our yard. That means that whatever grows in our yard is for practical purposes organically grown. Why destroy that for the sake of getting rid of a few dandelions. I do spray Wild Parsnip with the vinegar/epsom salt/dawn detergent mixture, so there have been three or four small spots that have been sprayed. But we don’t consider that mixture to be toxic to the environment, or to us.
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Worldly Distractions
Weather
12°C
Date: 1:00 PM EDT Tuesday 3 May 2016
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.2 kPa
Tendency: falling
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: 12.4°C
Dewpoint: 3.7°C
Humidity: 55%
Wind: ESE 18 km/h
Quote
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Milan Kundera
1929 –
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1975)
Attila’s comment on seeing my selfie was “actual size may vary”, I added “may not appear exactly as shown”.
Lol! Love both your comments on your shadow. 😉
We’re lucky that we have yard waste pick up here every other week, but they won’t take branches with diameter greater than 3 inches. Because of that, we ended up carting our branches to the dump ourselves in our SUV. I don’t like doing that asyou’re always taking a chance of a branch damaging the interior of the vehicle.
I looked at some pictures. Your tamarack looks like a beautiful tree. Almost looks like a hemlock, which is also very pretty. We have a few trees in the area that are similar but not deciduous. I’d love to have one!
Teri, yard waste pickup every other week would be great. We didn’t have to worry about it at the country house, we had a fire pit, and lots of areas on the acreage that needed clean fill. It is quite different in the city.
I haven’t seen any other Tamaracks in this area, so I am not sure where ours might have come from. One advantage to them is that they provide shade in the summer and let the sun shine through in the winter, great outside a southern exposure window.
We have a crabapple out front and we also had a large limb break off and just dangle there all winter, so Paul lopped it all off in March. I never really noticed it myself. We have yard waste pick-up by the City about 4 to 6 times a year, not sure which, probably 6. But we also are limited in the diameter of the logs/sticks put out there, and they have to be bundled and tied with string, although Paul says he never does that and they take them anyway.
Bex, we only have two yard waste pickup events, one in the spring, and one in the fall. Luckily, if one has a vehicle, the waste can be driven to the dump and left there, free of charge.
Personally I would love to have a chipper, put all the yard waste through it, compost it, and use it in the gardens. Chippers cost more than we could invest, and then also, where would we put it, we have barely enough room for ourselves, let alone a host of machines. Renting chippers is also costly. I wonder that no one comes around with a chipper, like the old knife sharpener carts, to chip yard waste in situ for people in the suburbs. I think that would be great, just get an appointment with the chipper when your yard waste is ready to go.
I think there is a 3 inch diameter limit here, but I couldn’t find that in writing, so that is what we went with. The logs are out on the curb as well, someone might just come around and throw them into the back of a pickup truck for firewood. I don’t think the yard waste pickup will take them, but it is worth a try.
The dump here chips the branch yard waste and then offers it free of charge for whoever can carry it. They also have free fine mulch you can cart away, no charge.
That is great Teri, I will have to inquire here to see what they do with the yard waste they collect.
P.S. They took took the larger pieces of of the downed branch, thank goodness!
I’ve never seen a Tamarack tree, so I took to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larix_laricina
As they give a map for its range, I can see why, not in Illinois, where I was born, and surely not in steamy hot Arizona, where I am now!
It’s a beautiful tree!
Thanks for the link Joan! The Tamarack grown here at Mist Cottage, but they are not common around the Great Lakes. They are prolific north of the Great Lakes though, and can be seen from the highways heading north in Ontario.
I imagine there are many trees in Arizona that I have not seen, since I’ve not travelled to the souther USA, other than for a few conferences where I gave papers, but those events took place in large convention complexes, and I seldom got to explore the landscape beyond the bubble.