Saturday, September 26, 2009

Fall clean-up, family style


Did I get any of my yard chores done today? Nope. I shall procrastinate until Monday evening, when the entire brute force of the family is at my disposal.

What sort of labor is a 3 year-old capable of, you ask? In the past, I have assigned the wee tot the following tasks with the age-appropriate phraseology following: pulling any and all dandelion flowers (or "picking the pretty yellow flowers"), tidying up the sandbox toys (or, "get your dump truck off of the thyme, dear"), and dumping a 1-gallon bucket of trimmings on the compost pile (but luckily encouraging phrases are not necessary, as any 3 year-old in their right mind needs no excuse to tip out a bucket's contents).

The 8 year-old is more tricky. The ol' dandelion bit doesn't work anymore. Tidying up the playhouse is iffy. Helping me move the (bulky, heavy) outdoor dining table around the yard until I find just the right spot, yup. Digging up the potatoes on a frigidly cold day, absolutely. In fact, any kind of shallow digging is enthusiastically undertaken, especially if earthworms are liable to turn up.

The adults in the house have the happy thought of a lot of heavy lifting before them. Things lifted, lowered, covered, rolled, stacked, or hung. And the ever onerous task of seasonal container migration. Out and back, up and down. Luckily all the unwieldy pots, the ugly pots, the non-matching pots, and the too-small pots were given away at a garden tour this summer, so at least we don't have to haul those around this fall. I have a little twinge of regret about some of the terracotta pots. They were very pretty. But beastly to move. Better a twinge of regret than a twinge in my lower back, I say.

1 comment:

  1. Congratulations on finally getting a blog going, I did not figure the 1st blog you set up would be about your family of flowers, but the journey of setting up a family blog begins with a single step

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. I really appreciate and (hopefully) encourage participation amongst readers of this blog.

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails