The spot in the yard where I'd like to place the fort was home to two very large rose bushes. I'm not overly fond of roses. My mom and grandma doted over theirs, pruning and fertilizing and picking off the aphids. I ignore mine. Don't even water them. That's probably why mine are threatening to take over the yard and theirs always looked so anemic.
A friend in town does like roses. She recently extended their paver patio and had just the perfect spot for them--where lack of water and over-abundance of dog had killed the grass anyway. She's been talking about coming and getting them for a year, but today was finally the day.
As you can see, they're ginormous. JT and I started by pruning them back. One had a lot of dead branches, the other had a lot of live ones that wouldn't fit in my friend's SUV. I haven't touched the things in the three years we've lived here, and I really know nothing about the care and survival of roses. Hope I didn't kill them.
In the end, we had a respectable pile of thorny sticks that rebelled against any confinement into Hefty bags.
The other day, whilst surveying the terrain, I noticed that our neighbor's little aspen grove had born babies.
I'm all about free trees, so before we dug up the roses, we dug up another part of the yard to transplant the trees. Our soil in CSprings is a thin layer of sod over clay. The type of clay you make bricks out of. So after we scraped away the sod, we had to steal mulch from a currently unused garden and dig it in. It was nasty. But hopefully, in a few years, the trees will block the lights that shine in the living room window from the car dealerships half a mile away.
Lessons learned: JT learned that yard work is hard. Especially when you're in a grouchy mood, anyway. But friends and zydeco music make it better. He also learned what knuckle-busters are.
As for me...I was flipping through a photo album a friend made for us when we left CSprings the last time. She lived behind us and included pictures of our yard. I'd forgotten how much work we'd done to that yard and how it actually turned out pretty nice. I have a tendency to only see (and remember) the mistakes I made, but her album gave me hope. Maybe this will turn out well.
Now our yard is ready for post holes.
Or is it?
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