LastDayofSchool

People keep talking about how lovely my garden sounds, and truly, I do cherish it. But I have to imagine that most people are envisioning something more gentle, organized, cherished. A garden that doesn't have, for instance, one horsetail, and a volunteer palm tree still at that awkward stage where it's got fronds all the way down to the ground. Did you know there are spikes, I mean foot-long spikes, at the base of palm fronds? Well, you would if they were hanging out, waiting to snag you. Fortunately they're close to the tree, so they're not in the bit that waves about in one's face, and the spiderwebs keep you from getting too involved with the palm anyway.

Also, I dug a big hole, and I sifted the dirt in the hole. The thing about sifting dirt is that it aerates the dirt, so people warn you not to be surprised if it doesn't fit in the hole any more. Umm, yeah, that may be a problem if your dirt is mostly dirt. But if your dirt is more than half rocks? Well, then if you sift the dirt, and you put a largish plant and all its dirt into the hole, and then you put all the dirt back, you are left with a smaller hole, but still a hole. A more sensible person would have provided themselves with some non-horrible dirt to mix with the sifted dirt and wouldn't have had this problem, but I did not think that far ahead.

You will not be surprised to discover that it seems likely the apple tree is not an apple tree. In my defense, the object it is growing looks to be a nashi, or asian pear, which is in fact a very close relative of the apple.