Yard and garden journal entry 3/14/2012

Only 6-more-days or so until spring!  We hit somewhere near 80 degrees F today.  The weather has been great for several days now, but today was the first day this season that I spent over 8-hours working outside. I spread weed-and-feed on the front lawn and some of the side and backyard areas.  This is a full month earlier than I did last year. Once the grass starts greening (hopefully in a couple of weeks) I’ll give it another application to catch the areas that I missed.  We still have plenty of potential for winter weather until the end of April, but I am going to get an early start on whatever I can get away with.

Durned if my Toro zero-turn riding mower won’t start.  I ran it once a month since last fall just to keep it exercised, but today it just will not fire up.  My local small engine expert will need to give it a service call; I think I’ll have him install a “mulch kit” on the mower deck and sharpen the blades while he is at it.  I doubt that I will be doing any mowing until at least the end of April, but I need to get it fixed now before the repair shop gets backlogged.

I have a few potted daffodils blooming, but they are rather scraggly looking and not worth a photo.  I messed most of them up a month or so ago when I moved them out of the garage too soon; a hard freeze killed some of them and damaged the rest.  I seriously need a small greenhouse.  Several in-ground daffodils are looking very healthy and are fixing to bloom.  It looks like the tulips are not doing near as well as the daffodils.  There is one big patch of dianthus that survived the winter and today I noticed one lonely but lovely bloom.

EDIT 3/15/2012:  Just for the tally sheet, a couple of my in-ground daffodils bloomed today!