D-Day
It all comes down to this. For weeks I’ve been amassing plants, dirt, PINE BARK NUGGETS, pots, hoses, and have finished at least seven beers in support of one goal: to have a garden that makes those pasty Rivals downstairs quiver in their homemade socks. I would also like to grow some food and other stuff for my own personal enjoyment. Just one problem: we have a roof leak. The roof looks like this:
Literally as I carried the last of 24 huge bags of dirt and mulch up five flights of stairs, my lovely wife shared some of our builder’s helpful advice:
“If you fill those planters with dirt, we won’t be able to move them if we need to get at the roof.”
After all this work, I wasn’t going to be able to plant?! A steady shake started at my fingers and moved up my arms, my head began to feel floaty and the room took on a shade of deep crimson. I spoke calmly about the things I was going to do to that man, all of which would have me gardening in prison. Luckily, my wife had a solution: plant in big bins that can be removed, god forbid we gotta tear up the roof. She even got me the bins. All I needed to do was drill a thousand drainage holes in them, which as it turns out, can compromise their structural integrity.
Then I filled em with PBN (ahem… that’s Pine Bark Nuggets), and dirt, then plants.
Though there was a “something’s burning that shouldn’t be” smell in the air, the little champs outside the Seventh Day Adventist Church across from me kept up the good cheer with some singing and yelling.
My good pal Hal gave me some of his extra tomato and jalapeño seedlings and they’ve been added to the smorgasbord of gardening goodness. I believe that I’ve got almost everything in the dirt.
Hope you guys like salad. I’m just realizing I’m gonna have some veggies to handle; seven tomato plants, four pepper plants and six cucumber plants.
I also picked up some snacks for these guys; some food spikes for the big potted plants and some organic stuff for the veggies called Zoom!. It zoomed the shit out of my nose with it’s horrible fertilizery smell. Handle with care.
In the decorative department I picked up a gang of perennials, most of which have names that sound vaguely like sexually transmitted diseases (see below).
I’m hoping this promiscuous sounding clematus vine will provide a bit of privacy and a huge swath of vines and white flowers to round out things. It comes highly recommended by my mother who may have the largest clematis vine on the east coast. Don’t even think about making a joke here. I’m adding a sweet picture of me and my mom to discourage that kind of thing.
I’ve planted. It’s a week before Memorial Day. I’m ahead of the damn game, for once. The roofers are hard at work, and in a show of support, one of them secretly watered my seedlings for me while I was at work. Things are lookin’ up.
