The past two days has seen us write about, and show pictures of, the tulips of our front garden starting to peak out from underneath the soil for the first time.

Our front garden faces north and is mostly in shade. Therefore, it was among the last part of the front of our home to see the winter’s snow melt.

Depending what part of North America you live (if you live in North America, that is   ) you have either finished, started or are about to start your garden clean up.

We started to clean up the back yard this past weekend. Not too much, but if we do a little at a time ever day or so when the weather allows then it won’t be that onerous a task.

So, I started with the garden adjacent to the south wall of the house; yes, the same south wall which our solar air collector resides.

Here is what it looked like just before we started the task.

Not too bad. Thirty minutes later with simply a rake, garden gloves and one of those over-sized paper leaf collection bags here is what we have:

Do you now see how there are a few collections of tulips in the garden? You couldn’t see any of those from the ‘before’ picture because the the leaves from last fall covering them up.

In case you didn’t, here are two of pictures of the two areas of tulips so you can see the before:

… and the second area’s before ….

… followed by an after picture:

Yes, the spring cleanup of the outside gardens has indeed begun.