Bay Weekly’s Annual
Home and Garden Guide

Longin’ to satisfy your spring longens

Spring has come to Chesapeake Country, reliably as ever.

Fickle as March seems, with its runaway-elevator temperature shifts, its phenomena prove otherwise.

First, light wakes us and sends us home from work.

Second, frog and bird song turns out there into a jungle.

Third, color returns to the world in the screaming yellow of daffodils and forsythia, the irrepressible green of willow and resurrected grass, the sweet pinked purple of magnolia and cherry blossom.

Then longen folk for rakes and spades — brooms, mops and dusters.

(Apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the line Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages for his Canterbury Tales about 622 years ago.)

We know about that longen, because our hands are blistered from using those tools.

To satisfy such longen comes our annual Home and Garden Guide.

In a year when spring has, so far, been about the only constant we can count on, Bay Weekly has dedicated many pages to the theme of investing locally.

Our 2009 Home & Garden Guide continues that theme, introducing you to dozens of local businesses that can help you satisfy your longen.

We see great returns from this issue.

All the businesses you’ll read about in our Home & Garden Guide are the advertisers who pay for Bay Weekly each week. We want you to recognize them for who they are — and what they do. Their investment in us, and ours in you, and yours in them, keeps us all in business. That continuity keeps our community strong culturally and economically. A strong community enriches our personal lives and it supports our choices. That’s true all the way into our homes and gardens.

Most of us in the Bay Weekly family like to do home and garden things ourselves — but not quite everything. So a guide like this Home & Garden issue lets us know who to turn when we ourselves cannot build our dreams.

This year’s Home and Garden Guide introduces more than a half-dozen builders. You’ll read what each says they do best. When one strikes a chord, you can turn from our pages to their websites to continue your research. After that, you might even want to call one, to talk about how dreams like yours come true.

That’s only one of dozens of Home and Garden services you’ll find introduced in this issue.

We tell you where to find dumpsters to haul away your debris — be it spring cleaning or home remodeling.

We tell you who to call to bring in new floors, counters, curtains, furnishings, decorating accents.

You’ll find who to call to tune up your heating and cooling system — a project that’s never do-it-yourself in our household.

Here, too, you’ll find who will climb up on your roof for that high-angle cleaning job. Who’ll sash your windows, and who’ll clean them — even the ones you could never reach.

Choices are as many when you turn from home to garden. In these pages you’ll find the best places to buy everything that grows. You’ll find local businesses to help you create an extravagant garden — or help you tend a small one.

We hope you’ll think of this year’s Home & Garden Guide as a directory to your Chesapeake Country village, and do your shopping there.