Summertime in Michigan is just about here, and with flowers blooming, mosquitos taking over, and weeds popping up like magic tricks, our to-do list keeps getting longer. Brad and I have been busy trying to get our house more “visitor-ready” for the summer, so there’s an ongoing challenge every evening and weekend of what we’ll work on next. Hang shelves or mow the yard? Print photos for the living room or put down mulch? Many of these little decisions have us running around like crazy people, but at the same time, the warm weather has us motivated to hustle and inspired to work longer days (Sundown around nine? Helloooo, summer!).
One of the fun things about seeing our yard during the spring and early summer is that we get to see our trees, flowers, and shrubs during a different season. After moving in at the end of last summer, we got a lot of hot-day remnants, a brief autumn with more leaves than we knew what to do with, and another one of those famous million-year Michigan (snowy) winters. Now, though, we’ve come almost full-circle and have gotten to see everything in different forms, colors, fullness levels, and so on.
That leads me to our trees. There are several in our yard–very large and very awesome. They provide great shade and a lot of entertainment as we watch squirrels run up and down the trunk and limbs.
However.
Massive trees create massive messes. Lots of whirly-doodle things (helicopters, seed pods, I don’t know what they’re called) all over the driveway, all over the deck, all over everywhere. Clean ’em up one day, be greeted by twice as many the next. I’ve just learned to deal with it and am trying to love finding those little things stuck all over my car every morning. After all, next season, it’ll be leaves. And oh, hey–those take a wee bit longer to clean up.
And then, there are the acorns. And squirrels and chipmunks. And squirrels and chipmunks love acorns. And they love to bury them into our yard. Everywhere.
Check it out–Brad thought he was pulling a little weed out of the front flower bed the other day. Then this came up:
There was a TREE growing in our flower bed. Daggone chipmunks planted a TREE two feet from my front porch.
Kids, let this be a lesson to all of you who neglect your weed-pulling duties. You may end up living in a forest by accident.
Then there are the random potted plants we’ve been trying to rescue from the spastic seasonal change in weather (hot, cold, hot, cold, winter, summer, spring, fall, winter, SUMMER)–lots of temperature drops and rises over the last few weeks. Brad planted some little tomatoes that seem to be doing okay, while I have a few succulents that I’m trying not to kill and some pretty orange and red annuals that I somehow rescued from burning up last week.
I took the picture above the other day when I thought these flowers might be in trouble . . . but they’ve since bounced back now that the weather has been more consistent (and maybe my watering has been a little more consistent, as well). And when a storm blows through and breaks off a branch, I just take that opportunity to clip off a bud or two to put in the kitchen window. Might as well turn flowers into . . . flower-ade? You know what I mean.
I can’t wait to show you more of the projects we’ve been working on! Stay tuned. 🙂
What projects have you been working on around the house or yard so far this season? Let me know in the comments!
