Spring!

It is finally here!! :c)

We had our first truly nice weekend weather-wise this past weekend.  We had one day last week, but both Saturday and Sunday were nice here.  Much of the nice weather has been spent raking the yard to remove the dead grass....definitely not one of my favorite spring-time chores.  I'm sore from all the raking.  Half of the yard was done two weekends ago and the rest of it was done this past weekend.

However, my plants are starting to grow and its really nice to see some green! One of the "weaker" lupine plants below.  For some reason it is struggling a little in its current home, so I may decide to move it later this summer if it continues to struggle.


I have some silver mound that I split last fall and now have four plants.  They are all a bit smaller, but will definitely grow a bit this year.  You can keep trimming them all year to keep them nice and tidy, so they provide a nice accent to the garden.


My clematis are starting to show signs of life as well.


You do have to look closely to see some of the green...but its there.


I think these two plants are called columbine.  They were a bit over-crowded last year, so I did some re-arranging in the fall to try to give them some more space this year.  Hopefully it will help and make them happier.


These ones are campanula.  They produce very pretty purple flowers...and lots of them.  These were also moved last year as they were crowded in with the columbine.


These next two are my happiest lupines.  They have more stalks than I can count right now, so they are definitely in a happy place.  I can't wait to see how many flowers I get out of these guys this year.


So this next picture is a bit odd.  You all know that I do quilting (or at least attempt to do it when I can find the time to get into my sewing room).  Aside from taking care of the garden, I also help split the wood we use to heat the house in the winter.  I started splitting wood last fall when I was going through a stressful time at work and I've found that I absolutely love it.  It is a great workout and is amazing at stress relief.  Beating on a big hunk of wood is very satisfying!  :c)

Since my husband also splits the wood, there were times last fall that we would both want to split, but we only had one axe.  So one of us would have to find something else to do, or just stand there and pick up the wood pieces.  I decided to fix that this year and put a new axe on my birthday list.  Its the same length as the old one, but is a tad bit lighter and had great reviews on Amazon.


I didn't get a chance to test it out this weekend since we spent all of Sunday raking (Saturday was spent doing some family stuff).  I'm hoping to be able to test it out this coming weekend and see how it splits.  The reviews on Amazon said that it was really easy to split wood with the axe and has plenty of power to it such that you can actually get through the larger logs.

I do expect to get some quilting in this week as the next three days have nothing but rain in the forecast.  Hopefully I'll have something to share later this week.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations