Gardening begins

The lawns are all cut now but did not dig out the dandelions so they will come back up again and the bees will have a chance. I did dig out the thistles however as they are painful to touch and step on in bare feet. The lawns look surprisingly good. I will get a load of topsoil to build up the lawn at the front where it is not growing quite as well as the rest of the front lawn. Not going to do much new with the flower beds out front as they have a number of perennials that pretty much take up all the space there. I will likely cultivate it a little just to aerate the soil. The lily of the valley is quite beautiful and the scent is getting stronger daily. 

The back lawn also came up quite nicely. There are a few spots that need fresh topsoil and grass seed and will do that at the same time as the front. We got our tomato and pepper plants and a tray to grow the sunflower seeds, herbs to start them for transfer to the gardens after the first of June. The hedges have grown nicely as well. Our maple tree is now huge. It started to grow at the front of the yard a year or so after we moved here and then when it was about four years old we moved it to the back of the yard where it has been ever since and now 44 years later it is huge. It is home to many birds that come and feed at the feeder at the front of the yard. We are doing restorative gardening this year and will not turn the soil but rather add topsoil and plant our plants and pull out any large weeds that dwarf our plants that we want to grow. I will probably buy some bedding flowers to give some colour to the backyard through the summer although again there are a lot of perennials. 

Still a lot to do. I want to empty the gardening shed and see if anyone wants some of the materials in there and will then shift everything that was in the temporary shed this past winter into the permanent shed. We will put the car in the garage again next winter just to make it easier to clear the laneway as a company does that for me. A few minor repairs this year and perhaps next year will repave the laneway although it still doesn't look too bad. 

Perhaps some time today on the Pincombe Newsletter as there are just ten days left to the month. The Pincombe family is quite interesting and especially I have actually walked in the village they lived in for five hundred years. Saw Park farm where my 3x great grandparents Robert Pincombe and Elizabeth Rowcliffe lived with their eight children. Robert was the son of John Pincombe and Mary Charly/Charlie and their grandchildren moved all over the world - Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and South Africa.  Amazing really and I have been in touch with a number of the descendants through the matching of DNA on every database. 

Prayers for Ukraine as always. It is so foreign to think that there is a war ongoing in Europe. World War II was definitely meant to end all of that and it is only Russia that wants to upset that wonderful peace that we had. They completely lack respect for the rest of the world. I am proud of Finland for taking the same stance as we ourselves took at the end of the Second World War when we said no nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. There are more than enough of them in various arsenals around the world we do not want them on our soil either. Russia's Putin and his thugs have decided to turn Russia into a pariah nation and we will regard Russia as such until she leaves Ukraine and restores Ukraine to pre-2014 boundaries and keeps out of Ukraine politics.