Bay Weekly’s Annual Home and Garden Guide

Here’s where you’ll find your next steps after the big thaw

Can you believe how quickly we’ve come out on the other side of winter?

Wasn’t it just last week we were slipping, sliding and climbing through four-foot-deep snowdrifts? A couple of 70-degree days, and we live in a different world. Our mountains — even the Appalachians in the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium — have melted.

In their place are wonders even more marvelous to behold: the self-proclaiming yellow of crocuses, daffodils, forsythia competing with the blatant pink-purples of cherry and magnolia blossoms.

Back on December 19, you had to have faith to believe Shelley’s words were worth the paper they were written on. This week, the guy was a sage to write If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

About spring’s energy, there can be no doubt. But have you got the energy to keep up?

The flowerbeds so recently stuffed with snow are now blooming with weeds. Chickweed, henbit, ground ivy and the irrepressible prostrate spurge want to make my home theirs. Trust me. I could spend from now till the snow flies again hoeing, pulling and scorching them, and my work still would not be done.

I’m never going to keep up without help.

That’s one reason this week’s issue is as welcome as the flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra-la.

This week’s Home and Garden Guide advises us on whom to turn when spring outruns us. Here you’ll find three-dozen experts to help you keep up with spring. And all that spring’s revealed.

The news is worse than grimy gutters and stained ceilings.

Day’s long bright hours shine a harsh spotlight on issues and irritants winter’s gray days kept hidden. So if you take Dr. Glass up on his offer to wash your windows — or go even further with See-Thru Windows & Doors — you’ll see whole rooms crying for the attention of one of the remodelers you’ll read about here.

Dare to call in The Maids or Cleaning Maid Easy, and your next step will take you to Cottage Chicks, Custom Wood Craft, Magnolia Shoppe, Millwood Furniture, SeaScapes, Second Wind Consignments or Wimsey Cove Framing to add dash to your shining rooms.

Or to Floor Systems or In Home Stone for even bigger projects.

Look too hard in the bright light of spring, and you might be calling Carol Cook of A Real Estate Advantage to go searching for a new home.

Hire these folk to do the jobs you don’t want to do, and you’ll have time for the jobs you love — including sitting a spell to see what spring has next in store.

The spring greening of my yard and garden is going to be all the more worth watching after the intervention of one of the half-dozen gardening and landscaping specialists you'll read about in this issue. In editing these pages, I've seen the light. My garden needs more than weeding and raking. It needs reinvention.

Read on. I expect you'll find inspiration and direction in these pages, as I have.

from the Editor

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