As of yesterday, I’ve owned my house for a year. The first year was focused on getting the house set up and in order, and now I’m turning my attention to the yard.

According to the neighbors, the man who used to own the house before abandoning it had landscaped the lawn extensively. Then it was left to run wild for years. The people I bought it from, who’d restored the house, mostly just mowed down the lawn before putting it on the market. It went wild with weeds in the summer, but now that I’ve cleared out a lot of the weeds and am seeing what it’s really like in the spring, I’m getting a lot of surprises.

For one thing, there are a lot of bulbs that didn’t get a chance to bloom last year because they were mowed down just as they were coming up. This year, the yard is full of tulips and daffodils. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of blooms. Part of that may be because the greenery was cut down last year. I’ve learned that bulbs essentially “recharge” after blooming by using the greenery as fuel, so you’re not supposed to cut back the leaves after the blooms fade. The bulbs got their cycles messed up last year by having the greenery mowed down as soon as it came up. The bulbs also need to be divided because they’ve been allowed to just grow and spread, so they’re in huge, tight clumps. After the greenery dies off, I’ll have to dig up some and move them around.

Then there was the field of something from bulbs. The greenery came up, and it looked kind of like grass, but thicker and more tubular, and when I pulled up some of it along with a weed I was digging up, I could see that it was bulbs, not roots, but I wasn’t sure what it would be. Last Sunday, it bloomed, and I had a field of these white flowers, which my phone identified as Star of Bethlehem. There are other clumps of these all around the yard. I also have fields of wild violets. I had some daylilies last year, but it looks like I’ll have even more this year.

I’ve figured out what the leaves of the worst weeds, the ones with sticker burrs, look like, so I’m trying to dig them all up before they go to seed and produce the stickers. That alone makes the lawn look a lot better. Aside from that, my main project this spring is to move my front walk, which is in the wrong place for my traffic pattern — as I discovered when I was shoveling a walk in the snow and realized it was nowhere near the actual walk. Moving the walkway will create a flower bed. I hope to gradually turn the whole yard into a cottage garden, but that may happen a patch at a time.

Fortunately, I’m in a thinking phase of work, and I’ve found that pulling weeds is almost as good as taking a shower for encouraging creativity.