On Saturday morning, Finn and I had stopped by the Lowe’s for dirt and I grabbed a bunch of marigold seed packets to plant among the tomatoes, as well as some dirt and six sheaves of leaf bags.

Baltimore County has timed the last leaf pickup day to come roughly three weeks before all the leaves have actually fallen, so every year we are caught with about 20 bags of leaves and no place to put them. I stacked them up against the house last December and naturally the bottoms all rotted out over the winter. Two weekends ago I got rid of about half of them, and this weekend I cleaned up all but two of the remaining bags before running out of covered space. I figure by next week (the next pickup day) we’ll have the rest of them gone. But this leads me to another garden project: a new mulch pile where I’m going to use next fall’s leaves for plant dirt the following spring.

I borrowed my neighbor’s pressure washer and cleaned the front stairs, the fenceline by the garage, two Scout traveltop inserts, and a bunch of the lawn furniture. Then it was time to get ready for the neighborhood happy hour/easter egg hunt, where Finn has now joined the ranks of the elders; we brought Bear and Ruby with us as representatives of the next generation. This one was in the early evening, so the kids had to wait a while for the hunt to begin, but I think they had fun.