Sneaking in some cleanup

The weather the last few days has been unseasonably warm, and with a temperature around 65ºF and a line of storms moving into the area, I thought I should do something about this mess behind the house:

I waited until March to clean up back here last year and wrote that I didn't know why I waited so long as this is the part of my yard I look at the most during the winter. So this year I wanted to get it presentable much earlier.

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You may be asking why I didn't just clean it up before winter. That's not really practical, as there would be leaves blowing back here until late November probably, and I'm not a "let's clean up the same part of the yard multiple times" type of gardener.

But why didn't I move all of the pots out of the way? Honestly, there was just too much to do getting all of the bamboos protected for the winter, and moving the tropicals into the garage. That early cold spell we had really rearranged my end-of-season schedule. So I left a lot of non-critical tasks for "later", and it's finally later. Without this warm weather, "later" probably would have been March again.

I do wonder why I kept a lot of this stuff, like this broken clay pot:

Oh, yeah -- I want to use it on its side in one of the planting beds and have a plant spilling out of it:

I've seen that done in a magazine article (or was it a TV show?) and it's a great way to re-purpose an otherwise useless pot. So I'll keep the broken pot, but move it and the rest of the empty pots somewhere less conspicuous.

With all of the pots out of the way I'll just rake up all of the debris. It's pretty thick:

What a disgrace! I've gotten used to it this way, walking over it daily. I didn't realize how bad it was until I did my post about 2006 and saw how nice it looked when it was new.

The mess rakes up pretty easily even though it's sopping wet:

I threw some dead annuals and potting soil on this pile too. An old beat up snow shovel I recently found when cleaning the garage is perfect for scooping this into a trashcan so I can carry it back to the compost pile.

So all raked up, but still not looking as nice as it should:

I'm going to have to get out the hose to wash these stones down. I don't like using water to sweep up, but with everything so wet already I don't have much choice. It's weird being able to do this at this time of year too. So a little blast of water and it looks a whole lot better:

Now on to the other mess over here:

There are a lot of leaves back in the corner, and the bird feeder always gets a nice carpet of compost under it after a few months:

I'll actually use my spade on this stuff, as it's almost like soil. After a couple of trashcan loads and a wash-down with the hose, this area is clean too:

Nice! Getting this chore done makes me feel a lot better, and getting it done before winter is even half over makes me feel even better. Thank you warm weather!

Note: the storm system that came through an hour after I finished this was a nasty one, spawning several tornadoes in the area. It's also going to get down into the mid-20's F tonight -- so our little taste of spring is over. (Remember that I usually write these posts in the evening, and post them in the morning.)