Putting Newspaper in the Garden: The Agony

So a few days ago it was finally warm and dry enough to till the garden. So Scott got the tiller out and gave it a tune up and then it wouldn't start. So he spent most of the day fighting with it and fabricating parts and swearing and doing arcane things to the engine. Finally he gave up and dosed the thing in carburetor cleaner and then for some reason it started right up. As long as nobody touched the choke.

Well, since victory was his he went and tilled the garden. Which meant that the next morning I was up and about and determined to get the newspaper cover down as soon as possible before the weeds had a chance to recover. Otherwise the garden turns back into a meadow and gives us the finger.

And nobody wants that.

So I gathered all the tools I would need, and of course a fuck ton of newspaper, and put down exactly four sheets. I know it was four sheets because on the fifth sheet my back went GERNT. Or something of the sort.

Then I had an adventure standing back up. And by 'adventure' I mean 'I had thrown my back out somewhat.' And by 'somewhat' and I mean 'thank the dear sweet lord baby Jesus I can stand up.' So I drug myself into the house and told Scott he was on his own now.

So the rest of the day I tried to help out. Although it was the kind of help that does not involve bending down, or kneeling or being that helpful. It was mostly a dull ache, up until I moved the wrong way and then my back would be all, OMG WTF FUCK FUCK FUCK ARRRGGGHHHHH FUCK WHAT DID YOU DO? ADFKSDHSHKHDSFHFDSH! And I would be all like, I DON'T KNOW I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY!

So that was fun.

Then I tried to fix it by getting drunk, but that super didn't work at work at all ever because I realized that falling face first into bed means that once the alcohol wears off there will be white hot pokers in your spine for ever and ever. Then the next morning I learned that sleeping on your stomach is the worst position ever for back pain. And by morning I mean 1am because there ain't no sleeping after that shit.

Luckily after a few days of not going to work or making money or getting shit done I feel a lot better. Yesterday was the first day that I could walk around and feed the pets and so forth without involuntarily yelling a whole bunch of random words like HUAAGH and AUUUGGHH and HOOOOAAAAYY.

Which is a big improvement really.

Today my back is very stiff but at least I can type things again. Also I am super thankful that I only got stuck on the floor once. Ha ha it's the little things. Also you know what's kinda cold? The floor. Also kinda dirty, but I have been unable to vacuum it due to horrible pain. Except today I probably could of but fuck it I am on vacation.

A pain vacation.

Pros: Great excuse for trying to read the entire internet.

Cons: Excruciating pain.

Eh, all in all I wouldn't recommend it. Just an FYI there.

Edging the Garden.

I called this part of my day edging the garden, mostly because I have no idea what I just did was really called. Also, I have really, really bad sunburn now. Anyway I spent the better part of today lining the edges of the garden with newspaper and swearing.

First off, because I am lazy and waited too long, I had to hoe the goddamned motherfucking grass back from the edges. Along with a bunch of other weeds whose roots appear to shoot straight to the center of the earth. Then I would slap some wet newspaper on that spot, shovel some thing on the top of it to hold it down, and call it done. Until the next section.

Of course that morning I had already been stabbed in the ball of my left thumb by a cherry tree, and had spent most of the previous night being woken up repeatedly by the dog because there was a thunderstorm. This involved him climbing into the bed with me, worming under the covers and then trying to dig through the bed and into the mattress which must have had some form of thunder protection I was not aware of. Of course this was highly distracting. Not only was I trying to sleep, but I knew Scott had an early morning for work. Unfortunately between the thunder and horrible ripping sounds from the center of the bed, I was not getting any sleep.

I ended up holding the dog in my office during the worst of the storm, when he alternated between shaking with fear and pacing around the room like an old British detective. Who was also a dog. Then I got the bright idea to check the weather and found out the storms were going to go on ALL NIGHT. Which is when I tricked Jack into running into his crate and then I shut the door and went to bed. Then I kind of felt like a dick.

So after thumb stabbing no sleep time, I gathered up my tools, a bucket of water and a crap ton of newspaper and hit the garden. Where I promptly got a blister on my right hand. You know, to even out the pain. After having all those thoughts about quitting, and thinking gardening is stupid and that weeds are the demons of the earth and that I wished that I had enough money to make someone else do this, I settled into a nice rhythm.

I would rake a section clear of ground cover, hoe out any weeds* I saw, wet the newspaper and lay it on the ground in a maneuver I dubbed, Garden Paper Mache. Well I was chugging along when I became aware of two things simultaneously. One, since it had rained, there were earthworms everywhere and two, my chickens really wanted to eat them. Except the only areas to get earthworms were in the areas I was raking and digging up. Which meant that for every three sheets I would lay down, the chickens would tear off one. Which meant I would have to shoo them away and fix it.

Which worked about as well as you would think.

The next part was pretty much exactly like one of those video games where you have to race around killing things as they try to get into your base. Except in this case my base was a bunch of newspapers and my enemies were chickens. So basically I played about five levels of tower defense in real life. With chickens.

Now I knew I had to get them out of there, but there was a problem. A problem in that all of the garden gates were damaged in the mega snow storm we had gotten and we have been unable to fix them yet because shit just kept on breaking. So I did the only thing I could do I went on an exploratory mission and brought back every stray roll of fencing wire I could find and then shove it up, under or across the gates.

Problem solved!

Except getting back into the garden was a pain in the ass and then I got lazy with the fence and a chicken got in and then I had to chase her back out and now they all distrust me and I had to jam metal T stakes through the wire to make half a gate because otherwise they would slip in through the bottom and then I would be fucked.

Then I was able to work in peace and I got it done while the chickens watched me from the other side of the fence and said stuff to me in chicken which I didn't really understand but I think was insults of some kind.

Which is, pretty normal around here, actually.

* Did I say any weeds? I meant all the weeds. All the weeds.

Transplanting Fruit Trees or Alternatively, Never Again.

Behind my second only-for-storage mobile home there are two cherry trees. Oh wait hold on, what I really meant was behind my second mobile home there were only two cherry trees. Now there are many. How we got from one to a shit ton was that, when you stop mowing the lawn, apparently the cherry trees take that as in invitation to spread motherfucking everywhere.

Instead of looking at this as an unfortunate event, we said, hey free cherry trees.

So, in a moment of optimism so foolish I am kinda surprised we went for it, we decided to transplant the trees into buckets. So that we could then move them out of the yard and into the orchard at our leisure.

Ha ha ha.

So armed with shovels and a wheelbarrow we went out behind the other mobile home and began to dig up trees. Now, one of things about trees that are all growing together out of one master tree is that the roots will be one giant mess. But if you cut off too much root the tree won't make it and then you will be a tree murderer and then you will never be able to go into the woods again for fear of angry Ents.

Also, and I not sure I have really mentioned this enough, the soil is really rocky. Did I say really rocky? I meant like super totally a lot sweet Jesus god where are these stones coming from rocky. So what started out as a simple concept, dig in a wide circle around the tree and then pry up to force the root ball out of the ground became a super fun full sun adventure.

First off, I would only ever make it about a quarter of the way around the tree, before I hit a rock. Then I would move to another side and try that, only to hit another rock. Then I would have the choice of making the circle wider or smaller to avoid it, if it could be avoided, and then I would fuck it all up and kill too many of the roots and then Scott would glare at me because he is really good with plants and all the trees he dug up were perfect and alive and shit.

So after murdering a few I got the hang of it.

And by got the hang of it I mean I was so paranoid that I would dig an extra wide perimeter and then separate out the roots by hand. Which of course was just the fastest method ever. However even with my crazy paranoia about my unintentional plant murder, we started to run out of tree tubs. So then Scott went to the shed and got more tree tubs. And then we ran out again and he went and got all the tree tubs.

Which is how we ended up with 25 trees.

Which is, for those of you not following along well at home, a lot of motherfucking trees.

So then we were all like, where the fuck are we going to put these? In the end we ended up setting the tubs right outside the garden. Which was up hill from where we were working because of course it was because life is a dick like that. So in end we just lined them up outside the fence and Scott watered them and petted them or whatever it is one does with plants and then I went inside to wash my hands and discovered I had sunburn all over my torso. Again.

So now wearing my shirt hurts and the garden looks like a Chia Pet and I am dead tired but it's all worth it because now we have more cherry trees that are probably about to die.

Did I say that? I mean that they are going to live forever and we will love them and they will be the happiest trees ever.

Yes. Ha ha ha haa. That is what I meant.

Totally.

Also, Ent's aren't real, right? I mean hypnotically speaking, if I just accidentally killed a bunch of fruit trees and then said that the ones we moved are going to die, they wouldn't come to my house and kill me right?

Right?

RIGHT?

Oh boy.

Fencing the Garden the Manly Way

After tearing out the lower garden fence so we could widen the driveway and ditch it, plus moving the garden up the hill a good bit we kinda realized we are going to have to put the fence back in a some point. Well, we decided not to just put the crappy metal T posts back in, but instead that we wanted a real fence.

If you have ever done a project like this you will realize that the early planning stage is where you can let your dreams soar free, before the second stage of planning, which is where reality usually shows up and slaps you repeatedly in the face. But considering it didn't dawn on us that we might want to replace that fence, until oh, last week, we had no budget, no planning and no reality. What we did have however, was chainsaws.

Manly chainsaws.

And the pickup truck. And trees. So that is what we did. We drove the pickup down to the back, quickly picked out a few trees, and cut them down. We cut the branches off threw them in the back of the pick up and used the bed to measure them to length and boom. Nine fence posts at ten feet tall, leaving a neat six feet that will be above ground. BOO YA. I cannot convey the speed at which we did this, with were like machines, it took less than an hour from start to finish.*

Digging the holes on the other hand, that was a bitch. We used a post hole digger and a pry bar. The the post hole digger was just there mainly to remove the dirt. Taking turns we would ram the pry bar into the hole over and over again to loosen up the rock hard clay at the bottom. The clay hated us. Deeply. Usually once we thought everything was going well we would hit a huge rock. There are only three options when you hit a huge rock.

1. Pry it out if the earth with the pry bar. That is, if you can find an edge. And if the hole is not too deep. And if the rock is not too big.

2. Bash the rock into smaller pieces with the pry bar. This only works on sedimentary rocks. Also it will make your arms hurt. A lot.

3. Give up and move the damn hole somewhere-the-fuck-else.

Needless to say we did a lot of rock bashing. But we didn't have to move any holes so Scott's spacing was not thrown off. We coated the bottoms of the posts below ground level with wood preserver/poison and shoved them in the ground.

We haven't leveled and placed them all yet, we got rained out, and we still have to put in the gate section, but really this project went fairly well. We did not remove the bark on the fence posts, which I am hoping will not come back to haunt us, although I have seen fence posts done both ways. So I dunno. All in all though, this was the fucking manly way to make fence posts that's for goddamned sure.

Nothing like a little working in the garden with chainsaws.

Really, I think that's how all garden work should be done from now on.

* Because we are AWESOME! And coordinated.

I Hope I Do Not Murder These Peach Trees.

Today, despite working very hard at my real job yesterday, we planted four peach trees. I hope they all live. Mainly I hope that because I touched them. I tried very hard not to breath on them or make eye contact. I kill plants. I am a serial plant murderer. I have killed ivy before. Ivy. Do you know how hard it is to kill ivy? It's like I am the lamest assassin ever. STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN!

Ahem.

Right. Okay. Look, I let Scott, also known as the-only-one-who-gardens-around-here do the planty bits. Like take them out of there tubs and put them in the ground and stake them and water them. We haven't watered them yet and I'm afraid to suggest it because I do not know what I am doing.

We used King, the best backhoe in the world, to dig out the holes. Unfortunately for us, we had to put the dirt back in by hand. We put rabbit poop, leaves, dirt, and then more leaves in the holes in the hope that the trees would have everything they need to have a long healthy productive life. It was agreed in advance that nothing short of Scott's death I would not water them. That being said, I am super excited about these trees. We paid extra for more established trees, which after watching the great cheap tree die off of O' Ten, I think this was a good bet. I probably shouldn't tell you where my dad had gotten the cheap trees, but it rhymes with 'Fallmart.'

Also, adding to the cheap tree problem was the deer. In the deers mind, we had not purchased fruit trees so that we humans could eat fruit, we had made an all you could eat buffet. I do not know how much an single deer can eat in the course of the night, but I am suspecting they turn into voracious black holes bent on eating until nothing is left upon this earth but dry grains of sand and forgotten memories. Which is why I eat venison. Asshole deer.

The decision to plant peaches came about solely from the fact that I used to think I didn't like peaches. Then I had a real one. Up until last year, my opinion was peaches was that they tasted like tart, hardish moist baseballs. That is until Scott brought home a bag of farmers market peaches. I ate them until I got sick. Then we went back for another bag. And another. And then we bought a whole crate. I was eating peaches like I was recovering from scurvy. And it was wonderful.

So we planted peaches. Wonderful delicious peaches. Which we will promptly cover with netting and anti deer weapons, because I will not loose this war again even if it means I have to use car batteries and electrify the damned things.

In your face Bambi.

*That's what this world needs plant vets! I'm on FIRE today people!