Yesterday, I spent the afternoon outside, and it was cool, cloudy...actually favorable weather for heavy landscaping and gardening.

As I work on an extremely limited budget, not to mention I love the idea of "reusing" things, I spend much of the day "rearranging" garden materials around the front and back yards. We lost an elm tree last year and have a huge pile of mulch out front from its demise...so I dug up wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of the fine chips and distrubited it in the front yard on a somewhat bare  and very shady patch that is difficult to mow - thus I just covered it with mulch for a "neat and clean" look. Then to my bulb garden where i spread a thin layer of mulch over the very sunny spot, to help the soil retain moisture and not "bake".

I filled in additional bare patches - on the burm with arborvitae, and along the fence. As I was raking the mulch long the bck west fence line, I spied a tiny Japanese red maple that we must have been pruning year after year to kill it - but , as a testament to life, it just kept springing back! Since it was in an inopportune spot, and since I adore that tree species, I looked around the back yard, found a suitable spot for it, near the mulch pile, to act as a sort of "screen" for it, and dug  hole and cleared away some fo the grass surrounding the hole.

The hardest part was digging up that well-rooted little tree. It battled my spade for quite sometime and unfortunately I ended up splitting the main trunk, but it hd so many hearty off-shoots that I chose the best-looking one and replanted it in its new "home". I then filled in the hole, watered, and mulched around the perimeter of it. I hope it roots well and grows nicely this spring/summer.

I recently ordered some Colorado Blue Spruce from the National Arbor Day foundation which is SUCH a great buy - a $10 membership will get you 10 free trees plus free shipping!  Granted, the trees are just 6" - 12" "babies" but, to me, that just makes it easier to plant them. I plan on placing 4 along our front property line for a traffic/noise/privacy screen, and then the remaning trees cross the west lot line.

Earth day is TODAY and Arbor Day is April 30th - try to do SOMETHING to help our environment this week if you can! Each small act of conservation deserves a big pat on the back.