It started out OK. I pruned all the fruit trees in February.
I pruned all the shrubs in March.
Last weekend was sunny and warmish. I spent hours raking and weeding and edging and top dressing. Two days in a row. I can't move more than my fingers to type.
My small goal was to uncover the shade garden and check on the perennials there.
From there I branched out to raking up some branches in the drive and the lawn. But this is how my thought process became my undoing.
"But why rake branches until all the tree pruning is done?"
So I did that.
"And if I'm uncovering the rhubarb, shouldn't I just top dress it with fertilizer? But before I top dress, shouldn't I weed out the crab grass? But if I'm weeding crabgrass, shouldn't I give the bed a hard edge to stop the grass from re-invading the rhubarb? Since I have the edger out, shouldn't I do the same to the asparagus bed? And it has crabgrass too...."
Today I took it easy and simply loaded up the truck with branches to take to the compost site and I bought a new burn barrel. Our old burn barrel is rather rusted out and I have been meaning to replace it for two years, so one more item off the List with a capital L.
Why do we need a burn barrel? We don't much. When we were first here and doing a lot of house destruction, we burned a lot of the short and scrappy lumber we were removing from the house.
This picture from 2005 illustrates how much we are talking about. This is one of my favourite pictures from that time. I went to visit a friend in Scotland, and when I came home, this is what my house looked like. The upstairs is missing, the diagonal line on the left of the picture is the upstairs bedroom wall, the lighter coloured square is where the dining room used to be. 
This picture is about a month later with the shell of the new construction almost complete. We actually reclaimed a lot of the lumber you see piled here, either we saved the wood to be reused or we chopped it into short lengths and used it to heat the workshop.
We were doing so much that it would have been prohibitive to pay for dumping the mixed construction waste at the transfer station, and it is so far away that it took a lot of time to get there and back with a load on our little truck.
When we started the destruction we had a dumpster for the initial debris and it was 100's of dollars. ouch.Then I began to use the burn barrel to burn all the branches from spring clean up, but now I can take it for free to the compost site in town which is much closer than the county site.
We still have a lot of paper which I have been trying to burn in the wood stove all winter, but that creates a lot of ash that needs to be removed frequently. The paper is old bills, taxes from 1994 to 2000, files and files of stuff we don't need to hang on to any longer, boxes and boxes full. I have a shredder, but the volume would take ages to shred, just as the burning in the wood stove was taking ages, hence the new burn barrel.
