Spring is, well, springing. And stuff. – 7 of 30

So spring is here at Haus Grothoff.

When we rented this house, one of the perks was that the backyard was so neglected and barren that the landlord said we could make half of it a garden, as long as we put grass on the other half. Anything would be better than what was there.

Denver, being a semi-arid and extremely sunny place, is a city where the soil gets baked to the consistency of hardened concrete not long into spring, the surface effects of any melting snow/spring rain quickly gone. This makes pulling weeds, tilling soil, planting grass, etc, a daunting sort of nightmare in, say, mid-August. It probably took us a good week to get four raspberry canes and the eight berry bushes we bought into the rock-hard ground, any soil moisture being at least a foot into the ground. We’d taken to using a pickaxe to trying to get into the soil, and it was painful. The soil was so baked that trying to wet it only led to water running over the surface and sitting there, unabsorbed. And then, to try to prepare the soil for the lawn, there was the Weeding From Hell ™. The previous tenants had just not bothered to water the back lawn at all, so we were told, so there was no lawn. No nothing except for very evil weeds. This is not to say that all of the weeds are not gone, but I did manage to remove, to the roots, all of the enormous and well-established weeds from the third of the yard we planned to put grass back onto. Try pulling huge, woody weeds from sun-baked soil when they have thick taproots which go all the way down to the deep moisture below. It’s fun. It’s a Hell of a workout. And it took me days upon days. And then… there was prepping the soil for the grass, which involved breaking it up. Also using various shovels and pickaxes. We only got about 1/4 of the lawn done between the two of us before winter, it was so hard. I wanted to cry.

The only thing other than the bushes, raspberries, a few strawberries and herbs we got planted were a few crocuses and tulips. By the time winter hit, the backyard basically still looked like a vacant lot with a small strip of grass, 3 overgrown half-dead rosebushes, and 8 scraggly skeletons of drought-dead bushes. Oh, and a shitload of evil weeds in the future-garden area. And a tiny parched tree in the middle of it all. It was horrid.

I remarked to my husband that our backyard had never looked prettier than when covered with the snow drifts from the repeated blizzards that persisted all winter. Of course, those drifts, which have only now melted, badly damaged some of our struggling bushes too. But at least it hid the wasteland.

It was a really depressing backyard. I expected some crack dealers to take up residence in our pseudo-vacant-lot area, just to accessorize.

So that was then. Fast forward to now. Snow just melted, and soil still vaguely moist.

We’ve been outside, trying to start again.

And today I had a good look at the progress. Rose bushes pruned. Crocuses blooming and tulips emerging from the ground. The barren lawn soil which required at least a week to prepare a quarter of last fall took two days last week to finish the remaining three-fourths, leaving rich brown seed-covered soil. The strawberries are flourishing, a couple of the almost-dead raspberry canes are showing leaves, and every single damned one of those bushes that we struggled to get into the ground last year – the bushes that were covered in 5 feet of snow all winter, that were so parched last year we thought for sure they wouldn’t survive (in fact, we were sure they were all already dead) – every single damned one of them shows new green growth. Even the formerly-2-foot bush which is now about 5 inches tall has a bud or two. And some of them look positively healthy, ready to burst into bloom. Oh, and the rosebushes are doing just fine, and the mint appears ready to take over the middle of the herb garden.

It still looks a lot like a vacant lot due to the huge number of weeds I need to pull in the garden section, but there are flowers and leaves and the promise of a lawn in a few weeks, and there will be vegetables a few weeks after that, and berries and blossoms and all that good stuff. And most of it will be our doing. I can actually see it ceasing to look like a crack-dealer’s paradise not too long from now.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about spring.

(Just don’t ask me about the front yard… I might cry.)

Listening to: Marco Borsato – Het Einde van de Lijn