There’s a beautiful old farmyard I like to visit, and it’s how I wish my yard looked all year round.
Maybe if global warming keeps cranking up as it has lately, it will.
The yard is a river lot, and the 300 or so feet from the long-retired house to the river is mostly just centuries old growth that explodes with green each summer. Gotta’ admit that as I saunter through it I wonder if some of that gorgeous green is poison ivy, but since I haven’t caught any there yet, I’m hoping it isn’t. So far no itch.
How nice it will be post-COVID to go back to just worrying about catching things like poison ivy, wretched as that can be.
That yard is the first place I experienced what a big healthy patch of fiddlehead ferns looks like, oddly enough particularly flourishing in the area where the collapsed decaying outhouse sits.
Go figure!
A couple of years ago, while prepping to rescue a derelict but restorable 1949 Chevrolet from its decades long parking spot by the house there, I transplanted a few ferns that would have been destroyed, to my yard. Of the five or so moved, I still have a couple doing well, but I think they all would have survived and thrived if I’d put them in a spot with a little more sunlight.
I probably should have dug a little deeper when removing them as well, but I was trying to make the potholes as shallow as possible.
There appears to be a few more there I could rescue. I’ll just have to take a couple of pails of the 22 huge dump truck loads of soil recently deposited in my yard to fill in the holes. That’s a story for another day.
Love visiting that dear old farmyard. Such a peaceful place to be.
They aren’t all that way.
This farmyard chatter has me recalling a story my Dad told me about a walk home from school to the family homestead back in about 1918 or so. He used to take a shortcut through a neighbouring farm, and on this particular day, as he approached the farmhouse, he heard the lady of the house yelling and cursing some.
No surprise, as this woman already had a fairly notorious rep locally, and when he got closer, he could see that she was screeching from atop a pail she was attempting to sit on. Dad asked her what she was doing.
Meet the real Cruella DeVille — who from Dad’s description sounded as though she looked a bit like a cross between Ma Kettle and Mad Dog Vachon. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
"I’m trying to drown some kittens," she railed, "but they keep escaping," at which point she stood up, turned around, kicked the pail and sent kittens scurrying everywhere. Dad’s arrival saved the day. He’s still my hero.
Some people just have no empathy or compassion for anyone but themselves. Horrible person. Hiss.
But I digress. One thing about being semi-retired as I am, allows you a little more time to look around when out and about, not so destination focused, and because I want to beautify my yard some, I’m paying more attention to what other people are doing with theirs. There are some absolutely stunning yards out there.
Maybe more so this year because we’ve been in lockdown so much, home renovations, landscaping projects and gardening in general, both for beauty and homegrown veggies, have become our go-to adventure replacing some of those vacation trips we’ve been so used to taking.
What better to do with money that was formerly spent elsewhere than to make home sweet home a more beautiful place to be, and so many are doing just that. Bravo. Have a great weekend folks. It’s fern time, and I’m diggin’ it.
Comments and column ideas welcome!
lmustard1948@gmail.com
