Spring has sprung

I hurt everywhere, a sure sign that we had a warm weekend. My husband and I spent what seemed like every waking moment ripping out our old overgrown evergreen bushes and replacing them with smaller, kinder bushes.

Have you ever tried to get rid of something that's been there since Eisenhower was in office? Then, per Plainfield's rules, we had to bundle all of the branches.

I'm burned, and I hurt.

But in related good news, we were gifted some hostas, and we got the rain barrel set up again. The newly moved hostas were showered in rain water, despite the weekend's clear skies.

This is the year for you to have a rain barrel. Get one from The Conservation Foundation in the Will County section of Naperville, or call your town government to see if they're offering them. (Plainfield recently did. Romeoville is, too.)

I just noticed there's a glut of them on Craig's List, too. They're cheaper there, but some of them are, ahem, less attractive, or not fully adapted. You'll want screening to stop mosquitoes, a spigot to attach your hose, etc.

You'll save money on water, you'll keep the rain to work where it fell, and you'll be saving the energy of your local water treatment plant. Why spend energy making water safe for human consumption only to put it on plants?

In Plainfield, we get our water from Lake Michigan. If I pull out the hose, I'm using water pumped from Lake Michigan and treated. Lots of energy involved. If I let the rainwater run off of my roof and into the ground, some of it will be soaked up, but a lot of it will just run off into storm sewers, into the river, into the Mississippi and down into the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, it's going to pick up fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Yuck. Let's just keep it here and use it while it's fresh.