Grandfathers

Today I finished the grade work around the margins of the house.  This task has taken awhile — I've been lazy!  But the most important part of the chore is finished.  I'll continue grade work as long as the weather holds.  However, some of what I'll do depends on foundation planting, which I still hope to get to in 2011.  I have yet to hear from Netta's, the nursery at Posen.  They told me they could recommend shrubs appropriate for the front of the house, e.g., something not too small or too large, which will thrive in a space which gets just a couple hours of morning sun.

The south side of the house is now properly
graded, but much more work remains.

The Weather Channel promised a 50% chance of precipitation today, and in this case the weather folk got it right.  Starting at 8:30 this morning we alternated every hour or so between rain, cloudy skies, and occasional sun.  It would start to rain... I'd take my tools into the garage and retreat to the house... and then the rain would stop and the sun would make one of its brief cameo appearances.  When the rain stopped at Noon I went to work digging up another section of the planned perennial bed behind the house.  This bed will be planted primarily with daylilies, but I'll leaven the loaf with black eyed susan and other plant materials native to Michigan and (hopefully) attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds.

My perennial bed will wrap around the window well
and then run down the length of the house.

 I'm digging down only one shovel depth — roughly 12-14 inches.  That's certainly enough for daylilies.  But the digging is demanding work, because under a thin veneer of topsoil one finds lots of rocks.  Most are relatively small — pebbles to fish-size — but a few are "grandfathers," big, heavy boulders which are hard to dig up and harder to relocate.

For the most part these rocks are smooth-surfaced, not pointy and jagged.  Clearly they have been run through a large rock polisher!  More precisely, they have been polished smooth by the glacier which brought them here from somewhere in Canada and then dropped them on my property when the glacier retreated.  They've been sitting here on my land for tens of thousands of years, waiting for me to plant my daylilies.  •••

When I dug up the grandfather
next to the shovel, I decided it was
time to quit!