Zeno, what a guy

If a woman has a mulch pile to shovel, first she must shovel up, scoop by boring scoop (with apologies to Paramore, but I sing in my head all the time) half of the pile. Then she must trundle these half-pile loads elsewhere, and dump them, leaving the raking of them flat for another day. But, when half the pile is gone, there remains half of the remaining pile, and so on and so on.

There's apparently a long challenging (to me) maths explanation as to why I will not have a pile of mulch blocking my driveway forever here, but I'm starting to wonder.The only way I can tell I made any progress at all is that one corner of the door is uncovered, and there were damp patches under the stuff that got moved.

Sigh.

Fortunately for my sanity, and my back, that's not all I got done today. Our lovely neighbors let me put the cherry tomato plants in their green waste bin, since ours is overflowing thanks to nephew's enthusiastic pruning of some trees. Amazing what you can get a big 13 year old to do if you offer a machete and a ladder. . .

Like Robert Frost's apple farmer, I know what will trouble my yard in spring, though. Volunteers in the making, no matter how much mulch gets shoveled on top of them.

And once all of the vines were cleared away, I could see this lovely thing waiting for discovery.

Crunchy, cold, perfect balance of tart and sweet, this Fuji made a great post-Ultimate hobbit second breakfast for me.

Of course, clearing things away meant I could see that not only am I not the only one with designs on the apples, but there's a bad infestation of powdery aphids on the tree. Time to get out the oil! Perils of seeing reality clearly.

Got Dramamine?

In the middle of shoveling mulch in the back garden,

 my crowded hive swarmed. Fortunately, I was there to see it and fortunately they started landing in a low plum tree. Also fortunate? I had a deep with enough ready frames to tempt them in. Finally fortunately, my dear son was willing and able to shoot video of the coaxing them into the box.

You might need antinausea medication to watch the first video. Unfortunately, my cameraman sees the world faster than most people, so jerky edits don't phase him. Be grateful that I didn't post the six minutes of the whole swarm process, because that one almost made me fall off my chair.

Never before have I experienced a mid-swarm hiving -- it was a matter of plopping the queen into the prepared hive box before they had really established a midway point on the plum branch. The bees really want a safe, dark home, and are easily persuaded once given one. I have questions about the status of the original hive. Will it swarm again? There were lots of queen cells the last time I went through it.

I'm clearly going to spend some time next week assembling some more frames and waxing in starter strips on them. There are too many old wax frames in my storage area, and I'm in need of fresh equipment so I can rotate out the old stuff. How do beekeepers keep up? I don't know.

We're almost done mulching, which means the back yard is closer to completion. I wrote an "I will know I'm done when. . . " list, and have been drawing lines through items. As is the nature of lists, however, a few items have been added at the bottom.

Transplanted peppers today, tiny, tiny peppers, and I may have to redraw the garden plan for more. There aren't enough bells for my taste, although there are many hot varieties. Then, I'll need to figure out where to put the cucumbers (and what kind of trellis/stake system to use to lift 'em up with) and get on that. I had hoped that some things would be bigger by now, but I assume the tour folk will know that gardens are a process.

Finally, I managed to get a quickish overview of the garden here. If you listen carefully, you can hear our youngest sprout talking about her plans. And you can see the various stages of growing/going by/just starting in the beds.