Nine paper yard-waste bags are lined up at the curb this morning, and almost everything in them is maple twigs. We had the deadwood pruned out of the silver maple in February for $1,100, and I'd hoped that would mean a tidier spring. It did, sort of. Last April the bags had branches as thick as my wrist. This year it was mostly pencil-sized stuff, but a silver maple sheds twigs the way it does everything else: constantly, and more than seems possible for one tree.
We did the main cleanup last Saturday, then finished over a couple of evenings this week. Saturday was 54 degrees and gray, which is about as good as late April gets here. Here's what a long, snowy winter left behind and how we dealt with each piece.
The plow strip and the salt burn
The city plow came down our street a lot this winter, and every pass pushed a little more of the parkway (the grass strip between the sidewalk and the curb) into the street. When the snow finally melted, there was a stretch about 15 feet long where the sod had been peeled up and rolled into ragged chunks, plus a few gouges where the blade caught the edge. Some of those chunks were still alive, roots and all. I pressed them back into place, stepped them down and filled the low spots with topsoil.
Right next to it, the grass along the sidewalk and the end of the driveway had gone straw-colored in a band about a foot wide. That's salt. We use an ice melt on our own steps that's easier on Moose's paws, but the street gets the real stuff, and the plow throws it onto the lawn. Gary's approach is to soak the strip a few times in spring to push the salt down past the roots, so once the hoses came back out of the garage, I gave it two long soakings on dry days. Some of it is greening up. Some of it is dead and will get reseeded in late summer, when seed actually has a chance.
My mistake came early. I got impatient and pushed a wheelbarrow of topsoil across the front lawn on Saturday morning while it was still soggy from midweek rain. It left two neat ruts from the driveway to the curb. Tessa looked at them, then at me, and said, "So that's your signature now." I raked them out as best I could. You can still see them if you know where to look, and I do.
The cracked downspout elbow
Walking the outside of the house, I found the bottom elbow on the back corner downspout split along its seam. That's the one by the back door that feeds the extension I added last May when I regraded the low spot, so it matters more than most. My guess is ice: water sat in the elbow, froze and pushed the seam apart sometime during the January cold snap.
A new aluminum elbow was $8. I backed out the two old sheet-metal screws, slid the new elbow on with the upper piece tucked inside the lower one so water can't run out of the joint, and drove two new screws. Then I checked that the extension still slopes away from the house. It does, and after the midweek rain there was no puddle by the back stoop, which tells me last year's topsoil held through the thaw. That was a relief. The regrade was one of the first outdoor jobs I ever did here, and I half expected the winter to undo it.
Twigs, beds and one tennis ball
For the twigs, the EGO leaf blower I bought last fall pushed most of them into piles on the driveway, and I raked up the rest along the fence line and under the maple. A rake still beats a blower in wet grass. The gutters along the low back eaves had a few handfuls of twigs and grit, which I scooped from the stepladder. The real gutter work waits for fall, when the leaves come down.
Tessa took over the raised beds. She pulled last year's tomato stakes, turned the soil, checked the cedar for soft spots (none yet) and made a planting list I wasn't allowed to edit. She's waiting until mid-May to put anything in the ground, which in Grand Rapids is just good sense.
Moose's contribution was finding a tennis ball that had been buried in the snow pile by the garage since roughly Thanksgiving. It was gray, flat on one side and his favorite object on earth for the rest of the day. He carried it to every bag I filled, as if to make sure it didn't go in.
Total spent: $27, for the elbow, three bags of topsoil and a box of sheet-metal screws I'll never reach the bottom of. The front lawn still looks rough along the curb. Seed gets its turn in August.
