Its 6 days past the winter solstice, and I have started gardening… Christmas day we had a hail storm… with 60+ mph winds… It was exciting, rather than alarming, as we were inside, with a warm fire watching the spectacle rather than dealing with it…
That afternoon, with the storm over, we discovered a tree in the front yard had been badly damaged, its main root broken by the storm, and was only standing upright because it was growing through our picket fence… It wasn’t a big tree, maybe 20’ tall, or an interesting tree… We thought about taking it out earlier, but the neighbor liked it and it did provide a visual marker… not a barrier, a marker… between our yards… The bed is maybe 20’ long, 2’ wide, white (only because the neighbor has recently repainted it…) picket fence along one side, the driveway on the other… There is another bed on the other side, maybe 4’ wide, but that is the neighbor’s problem…
I checked in with the neighbor, then started to cut the tree down… after I cut the rail on the fence the tree hung down allowing me to start by cutting the leaves and small branches… a few hours later it was reduced to a couple of 8’ tall naked trucks… They provided a lot of leverage to allow me to pull on the remaining roots while chopping away at the roots with an axe… 20 minutes later the tree was down, the roots out as well.’
I needed to clear out the planting bed before.. Now I need to pull the weeds, volunteer perennials and such as well and rebuild the planter box around the bed…
Then comes the big question, what to plant in its place… This for us in a unique question… When we purchase the house it was overgrown with trees, fruit trees, flowering trees, ugly trees, too many trees… We have spent 25 years taking trees out or at least cleaning up trees that dies of old age… We have planted a lemon and a couple of birches… The lemon was a necessity, the birches a crime of opportunity… but now we are really thinking about the landscape.
We visited the local garden center, not the fenced area at the side of the big box store, the real local nursery… Its winter so there is an unusual mix of plants, including burlap wrapped trees, something which we see for maybe two weeks here in the land of no winter. They had a couple of interesting trees… A couple of types of magnolia… various flowering cherries, some red barked maples… being immediate post Christmas winter there were few other customers… (in retrospect also the reason for the unusual mix of plants) the nurseryman was board… he was cold, he wanted an excuse to get out of the little booth… He spent some time showing us about… giving good advice, sprinkled with personal ideas… the kind of service you just don’t get anymore…
We bought a deciduous magnolia… I will go back on Wednesday and buy a flowering cherry as well… I have some Dutch iris stashed away, add a few lavenders, maybe sweet peas.
So the work list looks like; tear out the rest of the existing plants, repair, repaint the fence, rebuild the planter, then dig two big holes and plant a couple of trees… add other plants, add some mulch, and we have a garden… Oh, add water too.
On other issues… by now it’s dark. the ladies are doing a jigsaw puzzle… I sit at the computer. On the blog feed I have changed the photos… We are now looking at photos if the Nevada State Railroad Museum’s Carson City facility, both photos of steam operations and photos of the un-restored cars and artifacts scattered about the site… Larger version, as well as the Peru photos up previously are on line at //my picasa page./
Bye for now, Randy
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