funnystrange.com

I'm at a client's office trying to repair their crash-happy computer. (I seriously need this T-shirt.) Right at this moment the disk doctor is running, so rather than sit around looking stupid I might as well do something of my own. Luckily I brought my own computer along.

So, this past weekend we planted the hydrangea bed in front of the house. The bed in front of the house has been a problem for a long time, because the dogs like to sleep up against the foundation. I guess it's cooler against the concrete blocks. They also like to dig at the ground wherever they sleep, again to cool down. Over the years this has resulted not only in nothing growing there, but also in a ditch a foot deep or so, all along the front of the house. This is very bad. It encourages water to sit there, which can eventually cause the foundation to crack. You really want the earth up against your house to be higher so the water will run off, not the other way around.

I never used to like hydrangeas, but someone mentioned them to me recently (I wish I could remember who so I could thank them), and I was surprised to discover how many varieties are available online. We bought all different varieties, but tried to choose ones that will be about the same size (4' high and wide) but have different flowers. Of course we'll probably end up with one that's much taller than the others, but it will be a few years before they get big enough to notice.

We ordered six from Joy Creek Nursery and one from Hydrangea.com. I had hoped to get them all from a nursery nearer here, since that way we'd know they could handle Southern summers. Hydrangea.com is in Atlanta, but they are very expensive and seem to specialize in lacecaps, which I'm not crazy about. Those are the ones that have a mass of little tiny flowers with a ring of big flowers around it. I prefer the ones with a big pom-pom of flowers, which are called mopheads. Joy Creek, in Oregon, had better prices and a really good selection of mopheads, so most of our order came from them.

The plants from Joy Creek arrived last Thursday and luckily, the one from Hydrangeas.com came the very next day. They were all very well packed and looked healthy. Actually one of the Joy Creek plants was a bit the worse for wear, but I think it was because the plant was leggier, so the leaves got bumped around a bit more. The root structure looked great so I think the plant will be fine. A couple of them were in pots but most of them were wrapped in damp newspaper with plastic wrap wrapped tightly around the newspaper, instead of a pot. I think I already posted about putting them in shade and mulching them so they'd have a couple of days to get used to their new home before planting.

Creating the bed was actually pretty easy. We hardly had to do any digging because the dogs had already dug up that whole bed. There were just a couple of lingering plants to be removed, and a little digging near the edges of the house where the dogs don't tend to sleep.

We filled the space up with two giant bags of peat and eight bags of compost. Also, when the dogs were digging they tended to kick the soil up onto the concrete path, where it packed down and eventually covered the path. I had almost forgotten that there even was a path under there. Georg scraped all that soil off the concrete and shoveled it back into the beds. Not only did that add a bunch of surprisingly nice soil to the bed, but the path looks great! Like a real sidewalk that people would actually want to walk on. He even swept the walk after he was done shoveling.

Because of all the peat and compost, the soil in that bed is about a hundred times better than anywhere else in the yard. I hope the hydrangeas are happy there! The light there is good for them too: dappled semi-shade most of the day, then in late afternoon (4 pm or so) the left side of the bed moves into full sun and the rest of it goes into full shade. We put the sun-tolerant ones on the left side, but none of them will ever have that brutal mid-day summer sun beating down on them.

The last step was to prevent the dogs from digging again. I don't want them to get in there and undo all the work we did! We put up a lightweight 2 foot fence, just bamboo stakes and some plastic mesh. It wouldn't keep them out if they really wanted to get in there, but it's enough of a visual barrier that they haven't even tried. I'm hoping that by the time we get that whole bed mulched and planted up with ground covers, the dogs will have forgotten they used to dig in there all the time, and the fence won't be necessary. Which sounds silly, but sometimes my dogs' habits are surprisingly easy to break. If you can just distract them long enough, they seem to forget all about it. (My friend Nellorat used to say that when talking about dogs, "loyal" is a good euphamism for "stupid," i.e. "Dogs are so loyal.") For instance, Lina used to sleep on the bed all the time, but we kept her out of the bedroom for eight weeks after her surgery so she wouldn't jump. When we finally stopped shutting the bedroom door, she'd lost interest in the bed & hasn't tried since.

Unfortunately I don't think we'll get any flowers next year, because hydrangeas bloom on the previous year's wood. And the plants are so tiny now that they don't yet have any branches big enough to produce flowers. Actually the one from Hydrangeas.com might; it's quite a bit bigger than the others. I guess that's maybe why it was more expensive. But whenever they do flower, they should look really nice. We got three blue ones -- one bright blue, one lighter, and one with interesting flowers that don't open all the way -- one bright red/purple, one bi-colored purple and white, one white with a hint of blue, and one pure white.

Of course, the soil acidity affects the color. Soil here in Durham tends to be acidic, which would make the flowers all blue, but we added so much fresh soil to that bed that I think it's probably fairly neutral right now. I guess at some point we'll do a soil test and see if we need to add lime to keep the red ones red. Gina told me she knew of someone who had poured sulfer around the outside of a hydrangea, and lime in the middle, and ended up with blue and red flowers on the same plant! That sounds really amazing, though I think we'll get to know our hydrangeas the way they are before trying anything fancy like that. (Remember how I mentioned that I tend to go for information overload? A month ago I didn't know anything about hydrangeas. I thought there was only one kind: blue.)

I don't care what the almanac says, today is the first day of fall. It's not the first cool day, but the past couple of days were grey, rainy and muggy. This is the first day that's cool and sunny and not humid. In fact, it's a glorious day. The kind of weather that makes me happy to be alive & to have made it through another summer.

The tree men came! They showed up around noon and were finished just after 2. I was amazed that it went so fast. We went out for lunch and missed all the action: they were just starting to bring it down when we left, and everything was on the ground by the time we got back.

(By the way, beautiful fall days are not a good time to go to Fosters. The line was so long at the regular counter that we went to the salad counter, which is normally much faster. But after standing there for 5-10 minutes being ignored by a stream of employees who had perfected that "not my station" lack of eye contact, we walked out. Had a nice lunch at Rick's Diner instead.)

It's a good thing we had the tree removed when we did, as it had a big hollow spot in the middle. Yikes! We are so lucky that none of those hurricanes came anywhere near here. The tree guy said all the other trees looked healthy. That's what I thought too, but I asked them to take a look while they were working in case they could see something I couldn't.

While the tree men were taking down our poor dead tree, we planted our hydrangea bed in front of the house. Which I will write about in more detail in another post, because I have photos which I haven't processed yet. Also because I have to get a shower and get ready for the pre-David Byrne-show-cookout at Christa's.

No carrying water, but yesterday I did split wood. Know what? Splitting wood is hard. Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn't it? And I'm not totally stupid: I was expecting hard work. But it's not like on TV, where every log splits perfectly with a single swing of the axe. Actually, it might be like that for a man who's a foot taller and around 75 lb larger than me. Which seems like a more likely profile for a person splitting wood than my 5'1" and *ahem*lb.

I have two disadvantages: first, I don't have the strength to comfortably hold the 15 pound maul¹ back over my shoulder and swing it all the way around. I had to hold it up in the air and let it more or less fall on the wedge. So the arc traversed by the maul is shortened. Even if I could swing it all the way, the arc would still be short because my arms are shorter than those of my imaginary typicall wood-splitting tall guy. I'm not sure if I would do better with a lighter sledgehammer that I could swing further, or if I'm better off just letting gravity do its thing with this maul.²

So instead of perfectly split wood piling up around me with every swing, I have to fit the wedge into a crack in the log and whack it with the maul, over and over. I got 3 logs split in 45 minutes before I gave up, totally exhausted. Which sounds pathetic, and maybe is pathetic. But then again, those were pretty big logs, enough for a fire to last a whole night. If I could split 3 logs twice a week, we'd be fine for the whole winter.³

Needless to say I'm really sore today. I was expecting soreness in my shoulders but it's all around the torso too. I guess all those muscles are needed to stabilize the body while swinging that maul around. I can say with certainty that splitting wood for 45 minutes is a better upper-body workout than I ever got in the weight room. On the other hand, I was too sore to do the planting I had wanted to do today, which was a bummer. But then again you're really not supposed to work soil while it's wet. I would have done it anyway if I could have made my back obey, so maybe the soreness is a good thing.

In other news, despite his promises the tree guy did not show up during the long periods of no rain yesterday or today. Nor did he return my phone messages yesterday or today. I'm mildly irked, but all contractors are like this. Besides, we're not expecting any more hurricanes so a few days' delay is no big deal. If Jeanne were still heading for us I would have been more energetic about hassling the guy into coming out here right away.

We'll be ready for him when he comes, thanks to Georg's great work clearing away a bunch of brush and fallen wood that was blocking access to the tree. We didn't bother raking everything up neatly, since we're about to fell a tree right there, but already it makes the back yard look twice as big. It kind of makes me wonder how much we need the landscapers for the backyard. If he could make that much difference in one evening, how much could we do in a few weeks of concerted effort?

¹ A maul is like a sledgehammer with a wedge-shaped thing on the end. In theory you can use it to split wood without the wedge. That doesn't work for me because I can never manage to hit exactly the same spot, so I use the maul to make a hole to fit the wedge into, then hit the wedge with the flat side of the maul.

² This is what happens when geeks chop wood. But hey, I had to think about something while I worked.

³ I just found out that Textile does formatting for footnotes. Isn't that cool?

Sand & Soil seems to be the place to go for mulch. It's way the heck out east of Durham. (We drove past the Starlite on the way, but didn't see the remnants of the screen because it had all been cleared away.) They only charged $20 for a whole truckload! Though I have to say, it looked like a lot more in the truck than it does in a pile in my yard. I had thought that two truckloads would be all I'd need for everything in the front of the yard. But now I'm wondering if two loads will even cover that bank along the driveway.

My friend David went with me to get the mulch in his truck. We had originally planned to get two loads, but his truck was a bit under the weather (backfiring constantly and threatening to stall at every stoplight), and so was David (hangover). So we got one load and then called it a day. David is an avid gardener so we had fun along the way talking about his garden. He offered to give me a bunch of perennials when he divides them this fall, which will be great. He goes for native plants & a natural-looking garden just like I do. Nothing too fussy or high-maintenance.

I'm definitely going to need several more loads of mulch, and probably a load of soil too. I hate to take up so much of David's time, but I wouldn't really feel safe borrowing his truck and driving it alone. So I may have to look for another friend with a truck I can borrow, or maybe spring for delivery of a really big load.

We continue plugging along in the garden, no dramatic transformations but steady progress. Last weekend we put down black plastic to cover the side of the yard that had the worst overgrowth before. We saw on a TV show ("Gardening by the Yard" on HGTV, I love the goofy host) that thick black plastic, if left in place for a couple of months, will completely kill everything under it. Then we can start over, and either sow grass seed or build a flower bed. We haven't decided which yet. The brush and brambles were already starting to come back, so I think we got the plastic down just in time.

Then Georg cleaned the gutters on the back of the house (the landscapers had done the front). Watching him up on top of that ladder made me nervous, but I felt like I needed to stay outside so I'd be right there if anything happened. So I cut down a stray shrub that we hate, and also deadheaded the butterfly bush. I don't know if you're supposed to do that or not, but it had dead flowers all over it so it looks much better now.

I think Monday was the day it rained, and all I got done was to see that one of the downspout extenders wasn't working properly and fix it. I had to dig some soil away from the downspout to make room for the extender, which was kind of a mess since I didn't wait until it stopped raining. The downspout extenders seem to be doing a good job of taking water away from the house. Unfortunately, even though the gutters have all been cleaned there's still water spilling out right in front of our front door. From the ground we can't tell if the gutter is still blocked, or if it's rusted through. Argh.

The rest of the week is kind of a blur so I can't give a day-by-day review. Though I do remember spending a couple of hours digging up brambles, planting some more herbs in the herb garden, and also planting the balloon flowers and obedient plants down by the road. I did that yesterday, and this morning my wrist hurt like hell. It woke me up around 5 am feeling all numb. I'm convinced that shoveling is aggravating my wrist: normally it wouldn't have hurt like that unless I had spent all day working on my computer non-stop. Maybe I should wear the wrist brace while shoveling.

This week was supposed to be the big mulch trip, but alas my friend with a truck cancelled because he had a work deadline run a day late. So we have tentatively rescheduled for next Tuesday, though we may likely have to postpone due to Frances-related rain.

Did not do a darned thing in the yard today. I meant to plant the black-eyed susans but we spent most of the day at Carmax (in case Georg doesn't write about it, he bought a car!! A 95 Toyota Camry, with V6 and leather seats! It's really nice!) and I was strangely tired in the afternoon so I read a book instead of working.

We did go to the farmer's market in the morning, didn't buy any plants but had fun looking. We saw a few things we liked & may go back for, notably "goblet flower," whose leaves look like an iris and whose flowers look like an orchid. I looked it up online; apparently it's an unusual plant from South America and we're on the northern edge of where it will survive. I'd like to get just one or two and see how they do. And we saw something beautiful called "rain lily" but I looked it up in my gardening book and they have to be dug up every winter. Forget that!

We've been going back and forth on what to plant in front of the house, along the foundation, and I think we've settled on hydrangeas. I've always thought of them as kind of plain, but I was looking around online and was surprised at how many interesting varieties there are. Unfortunately, I also discovered that they are toxic. Which is a problem for anything planted inside the fence, because Lina has a bad habit of chewing on leaves and grasses. She doesn't seem to eat them, just likes to pull them out. It's like a nervous habit I guess. But still, I don't want to plant anything poisonous inside the fence where she can get at it.

More research revealed this page on cat-safe gardens, which says that hydrangea is only mildly toxic, and the animal would have to eat an entire flower head to get sick. It's highly unlikely that Lina would ingest that much. That same page also revealed that azalea, iris and ivy are also toxic. All of which we have plenty of in our yard, and none of which Lina has ever chewed on to my knowledge. So I feel safe planting hydrangeas.

Yesterday afternoon my gardening chore was to dig up those brambles along the driveway. It's not as fun as planting flowers, but I feel good about having done it. I worked for about an hour and made a pretty good dent in them. The only problem is, I'm not sure how much of the root system needs to be removed. Some places I was able to pull up several feet of root, but in other places I could only get the big rhizome. If they need that rhizome to survive, then it may only take us a year or so to eradicate them. But if they can come back from any root, then we'll never be rid of them. They have roots criss-crossing that entire bank, and I'm afraid to till because the main sewer pipe is right under there, I'm not sure how deep.

Then last night my friend Patricia and I went to AV Geeks in Raleigh. She had never been before, and she loved it (of course!). The show, "Drinky Drink," was (as you might guess) all short films about alcohol. Most of them were negative, PSAs about the perils of drinking and so forth, but he did a good job of presenting films that were funny and/or interesting, not too much of a downer (for instance, he avoided the gory drunk driving films they used to show in driver education programs). There was even an episode of Fat Albert! Although for me, the most interesting part of the show was the videotapes of Japanese TV he showed before the "Drinky Drink" program began. Included were a deranged game show about (I think) two Japanese men sent to Latin America to be migrant farm workers, and an appalling comedy show in which one member of the comedy troupe needed to have a mole removed, but instead of going to a doctor the troupe came up with inventive ways to remove the mole. (He did go to a doctor at the end, after the series of disgusting mole removal methods all failed.)

This morning I drove Georg to work, then since I was half-way there already I went on to the farmer's market. Bought peaches and some plants. The peaches weren't as nice as last time (they don't give free samples on weekdays so I had to guess which were the nice ripe ones), but I did well on the plants. I got some sad, scraggly herbs -- regular thyme, tricolored sage, and chamomile -- for 75¢ each at the big nursery, then went down to the stalls and bought some flowers and a couple more herbs.

There's one plant seller at the farmer's market that I like in particular. They're called Archer something, Archer Farms maybe. They carry the kinds of plants I want, their signage is very helpful, and so are their staff. I bought blue balloon flowers to go with the white ones, black-eyed susans, something called "obediant plant" (spiked flowers that don't need staking! yay for the book of lists!), chives and greek oregano (to go with the mexican oregano). I ought to find out where the Archer people's nursery is located. I bet they have a lot more plants there than at the farmer's market. (Lisa, they have many different types of ferns -- you might want to check them out when you're ready to plant.)

When I got home there were of course a couple of "oh my god where are you??" work crises. After dealing with them I went ahead and planted the herbs, but saved the flowers until the weekend, after the mulch is down. The herb garden is starting to look nice! I'm trying to plant them far enough apart that they won't end up horribly crowded. But I've probably miscalculated and will end up moving some things next year.

While I was working a neighbor from across the street came over and introduced himself. It was kind of embarrassing to have to admit that no, we hadn't just moved in, we've just been slack-asses about the yard. But he seemed like a nice guy and didn't say anything judgemental about the formerly appalling yard conditions. And he was nice about the dogs & didn't mind them barking at him while he walked over, so he wins bonus points in my book.

The weird part of the conversation was that apparently the landscapers had told him Georg was "just getting back," and somehow in his mind he added "...from Iraq" to that sentence. So he had this romantic idea in his head of me as a grieving war wife, hiding behind all that overgrowth while my husband was on active duty. And then when he got back we were so happy we cleared out the yard, opening our home to the world again. It was such a great story that I hated to disabuse him of it.

We also talked briefly about Rod Torfulson's Armada. He asked me if I played drums because he had heard them recently, and I just pointed next door. He said that he's a music teacher (teaches piano in his house, how cool is that) so he also plays drums sometimes. But he doesn't have the amps cranked up to 11, thank god. I told him that we were hoping to reach a compromise with the kids where they could practice their music without it being so noisy. And without us losing our minds, bleeding from the ears, or calling the cops. Actually I didn't say that part out loud.

This street isn't designed for foot traffic (busy road, no sidewalk), and I've never been very outgoing with neighbors, so it was nice to meet a neighbor and have a pleasant conversation. And not feel like I had to apologize for bringing down his property values.

So we've decided on a plan of action for the back yard. See, the landscapers told us that the back yard was going to be more work than the front, which I assume means it will cost more. Meanwhile we noticed that one of the trees in back is looking sickly, if not dead. The tree looms over our shed and is also tall enough to hit the house. Clearly, that's the priority. So here's our schedule for backyard work:

1. take chain saw in for repair (check! did that yesterday.)
2. cross our fingers that Frances lands someplace else and tree does not fall on house or shed.
3. get chain saw back next week. Use it to cut down "volunteer" saplings (I love this term!) that are blocking access to the tree.
4. Hire tree guy to remove tree.
5. Hire landscapers to come back and do the rest of the back yard when we have the money together, probably October.