The backyard doesn’t look like much. Some sticks. A couple dozen spent snowdrops. Five daffodils. But now that I’ve finally cleaned up last season’s debris, you can see that hundreds of plants are just starting to emerge. This weekend finally felt like spring in Pittsburgh and I spent most of Sunday in our backyard tidying up, assessing and planting.
When we moved into this house four years ago, the backyard was all lawn. We sheet mulched nearly all of the grass but left a little patch for picnics. One thing I’ve struggled with is defining that space between lawn edge and garden bed. I first experimented with having no border but that just led to grass creeping into the garden and garden creeping into grass in a way that was difficult to maintain. Over the winter, Brooke and I found a huge branch that had come down in a storm. We dragged it into the backyard, cut it up into a few sections and now it’s creating a natural edge to the garden.
I wanted to plant some flowers to soften the log border and ordered two different kinds of coreopsis from Prairie Nursery: Rose Coreopsis and Lanceleaf Coreopsis. They don’t look like much now but I’m already imagining a titmouse and chipmunk having a conversation on one of these logs surrounded by a blur of pink blooms.
Last fall a few people brought my attention to the “Boaz Daffodil” for sale in a number of bulb catalogs. I ordered a few and now I’m finally able to enjoy my namesake daffodil. I’m not normally a big daffodil fan but I can’t help but be charmed by these ones.
The Virginia bluebells have been blooming for a week.
And the bloodroots just started blooming this past weekend.
The Eastern redbud is on the verge of blooming.
The irises are just starting to peek out of the pond.
And this is where this newsletter takes a dramatic turn. We’ve spotted a rat in our yard. Last week we learned it can climb walls.
And this is no ordinary rat. It was able to excavate under our flagstone patio, hauling out giant rocks in the process, to construct some sort of underground rat bunker.
I’m not even sure how to get those rocks back under that flagstone. Do we have to contact professionals to lift that stone up and repair the area? Can we train the rat to put those rocks back underneath?
Kip knows there’s a rat in our yard. He’s been pacing the area with a newfound sense of purpose. So far we haven’t done much to address the rat’s presence. Honestly, I’m too busy waiting for this trillium to flower.
Have you dealt with rats in your yard? What have you done? Or are you also too busy admiring your springtime blooms? I’d love to hear about it.
And one more thing: If you want to see what spring looks like in the UK, you can check out Jack Wallington’s post on
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Cats are the masters at getting rats. Years ago I (and my cat)moved in with my girlfriend at her house in SoCal. Her back patio had an enormous Bougainvillea growing all over the wrought iron fence and a huge rat had taken up residence in it (well protected by the Bougie's vicious thorns). My girlfriend was not fond, to put it mildly, of giant rats and it had been living there for some time. But within a couple days my cat had dispatched it. She was so impressed she made a little 'Ratter' certificate of achievement for him.
I have a rat story.
During peak covid summer, all the city rats, languishing from the emptied restaurant dumpsters they were used to, flocked to our local community garden. We struggled to find a viable solution as the rats snatched everything from snap peas to chicken eggs, when a man we call “ Dan the Snakeman” volunteered a solution. A rat stake out. So he, a six pack, and a small air rifle full of bb pellets, and apparently a plethora of free nights— made a hunt of it. He ended up being the mercenary of some two dozen rats, some as big as chihuahuas