Summer officially arrives on Sunday, June 21st at 4:24 a.m. on the east coast, but did we miss spring? Sure, we had some beautiful eighty-degree days in early April, when we all knew it was too early to do anything, and we have had a few other nice days since. We have also had some cold days including last Saturday with morning lows in the thirties and an afternoon high, windy, cloudy and barely reaching the upper fifties. Sure, this week is better because we are in June now, but out of the three calendar months that comprise spring, we are going to be lucky if we see three nice weeks out of those three months. It has been cold, but we should be turning the corner now. 

With May being over, I mowed my hay field, aka my lawn, for the first time this year. My new mower had no problem cutting through the high grass, but I had to go much slower than I thought I would have to not because the grass was so high but because I had so much wildlife in my yard. Leopard and tree frogs as well as toads and a few garter snakes all taking up residence in my tall grass, and I had to make sure that they all had enough time to get out of my way. Now my lawn is beautiful at about three inches tall. I have left my lawn a little taller than normal this spring because of the unusual weather. By keeping it taller the grass blades can shade themselves on the hot dry days we have seen. I have seen some lawns that have been cut too short and now they are brown already because the sun dried the ground out. After a good rain they will green up again but that can take awhile too. It seems like we are going through weekly changes where we are getting a rainy week then a dry week, not a rainy day or two. 

 After getting my lawn in shape, it was time to light up my firepit in the backyard to start burning all the winter debris from dead trees around the woods in my backyard. There used to be a lot of ash trees in the woods around my house, but the Emerald Ash Borer killed most of them between the last five to ten years ago. Now whenever we have a severe windstorm there is usually one or two of them that come down, taking down other live branches from other trees as well. 

I like to keep my forest floor clean so that I can get my lawn mower through there to mulch up all the fallen leaves from year to year so that they break down faster to release nutrients back into the soil. I can also keep the barberries from coming up everywhere by keeping them mowed off. Years ago, New York banned barberries from being sold in New York because of the problem that regular Japanese barberries would reseed themselves so easily when birds would eat the berries then dispose of the seeds in the woods. At first, this was a big problem for garden centers as barberry was about the only bush that deer wouldn't eat. Luckily, horticulturists had already being working on the problem fifteen years before this happened and once it did, a new breed of barberries came onto the market that are sterile so they can't reseed and approved for sale in New York. But I digress, back to the tree problems. 

It took half a day to get all the downed trees cut up. The rotted dead wood went to the firepit while the good wood got stacked by the garage to be used next February and March for cooking down maple sap in our outdoor fireplace. We had success this past spring making syrup but used a propane cooker outside to do it, and it cost roughly a hundred dollars in propane to make just under a gallon of maple syrup, so making syrup with propane is just not cost effective. So, we made a fireplace out on a concrete pad in the backyard to use a wood fire for cooking syrup next spring. We will also be tapping more trees next year now that we are getting to know what we are doing again, so we needed to up our game. 

Next week I'll tell you about some interesting facts about potatoes that I didn't know or expect.