Friday, at last! Another weekend looms! I have lots of stuff to do in the house--putting shelves in a bookcase, painting, tiling, cleaning. . . but I know that since it'll be nice weather and we had a wonderful heavy rain yesterday (means the soil will be PERFECT for digging in!) that I'll be out in the yard all day tomorrow. I'm gradually cleaning out the beds, putting in new mulch, putting in a few bedding plants in places, etc. I have some new gladious bulbs to find a place for and since my iris went totally into hyperdrive this spring I have to transplant a few of them at the same time. I have a couple of small shrubs to move in to as-yet-undug beds, and I have to turn the compost. It's a big compost enclosure and a small new compost pile beside it.

I have lots of things that have seeded the area and started small sprouts that need to be dug up and transplanted, and several of those are promised to neighbors. I have to start digging out some stumps and roots from a hedge I murdered last year in the spring. If I manage one or two a weekend (ha!) I'll have them out by mid-summer.

I also have news! My neighborhood is adjacent to 200 acres of prairie and riparian land that was sold and was slated for development. Several developers came in on spec and tried to get the village to rezone to little zero lot line ghettos, and we wouldn't let them. This last guy actually did buy the land before he went through the process, so he was more motivated to work with us (the land had been zoned multi-family, for apartments, and no one wanted those and he didn't want to build apartments because our zoning was so strict, as one guy said, "you'd have to own a Lexus to be able to move in there.") I spoke, as did others, about the need for larger yards. In the end, his PD (planned development) was set with existing standards of mid-sized lots in the village, at least 75' wide (not huge, but larger than one finds in large urban areas today). And I feel like I worked hard and single-handedly to get the city council to understand how important to accept the land along the creeks, where they won't build, as park land. (They were originally going to have the developer keep the land--long story). The developer agreed last night to deed all of that over to the city, so that means a nice little trail system over about 50 acres of greenbelt. Not huge, but we only have about 2500 population now (this development will probably add about 1,500 more people) so it's a nice ratio of people to park land. I sure couldn't afford to buy the land and just leave it as it is, but at least we'll get nearly 25% of it (including the largest chunk that is across the street from me, as it follows our creek). Our village is completely surrounded by Fort Worth, and we're very near to a trail system that follows our creek from where it enters Fort Worth. I think we can connect to that in the future, to everyone's benefit. The village plans to leave the native vegetation in place. Yessss!!!

So what is everyone else doing this weekend?

SRS