Depending on my mood, junk mail generally either gets shredded or filed in the circular bin unopened. Although it certainly resembled your average piece of snail mail spam, something about it caught me just long enough to open and skim the contents. Addressed to all lot owners in our neighborhood, the letter began as follows:

“We are beginning to installing terrace trees.”

I read it three times to make sure I wasn’t imagining the double -ings. O-kay… this? Does not bode well. They asked for $443 from each lot owner in paragraphs two and three with a due date of “promptly.” Having no idea what they were talking about, I took advantage of their invitation to email questions back to them for clarification. Three trees have shown up on the property in the last two days (one of which was planted next to the mailbox), it looks like there is a marker for a fourth and I have yet to receive a response from the company.

The trees are pretty and more mature than anything else on our lot, but we had plans of our own for trees. Plans that are now going awry unless I can talk them into taking their uninvited foliage back. Given the Orwellian neighborhood rules, this is highly unlikely but it’s at least worth a try. Either way, I’m not sending them any money until I’m satisfied that there’s no other way around it.

I think I have mentioned my love for home grown vegetables before. Thanks to a friend of mine who was happy to share her extensive research on soil, seeds and square foot gardening, my second vegetable garden is off to a great start. If I kill it this time, it will be due to all -new- mistakes.

The best shop in town, which is also the biggest and the only one that carried a couple of the ingredients, was actually waaaay out on the outskirts of the other side of town. So, in exchange for some of my friend’s heirloom and organic seeds, we went out together with my truck to reduce the number of trips needed to haul enough ingredients back for four times the recipe; three for my friend and her family, one for mine. (One recipe was enough to fill two four by four foot boxes six inches deep.) Four bales of peat moss, four bales of vermiculite, sixteen bags of compost, sixteen bags of sand and one small bag of lime later, both the truck and her car were packed to the gills and thank goodness because the variety of other goodies available there was just stunning. They must have had at least a dozen varieties of lilac on display alone. (A pox upon my budget!)

Happy to provide my dad with another excuse to use power tools, I bought some 1×6 pine and had him cut it into four foot lengths with notched ends. Once assembled, I coated the outside and top edges with a bit of leftover white shop paint a friend had donated for our basement project and arm wrestled Mym for placement rights in the yard. (I lost.) The peat moss, vermiculite and compost were mixed on the floor of the garage with a shovel and hauled out to the garden in the fertilizer spreader where the sand, lime and a touch of fertilizer were then mixed in. It was oddly reminiscent of combining the dry ingredients for the biggest chocolate cake you’ve ever seen. And, as it turned out, the folks loading the truck miscounted on the compost and we ended up with an extra bag. My soil, therefore, is extra crappy.

I picked up a few trellices (the best kind – on sale) for the climbers and got to planting.

Box 1:

early moonbeam watermelon
golden sweet pea
pole bean
bush delicata squash (tastes a lot like butternut but easier to cook)
orange bell pepper
mideast prolific cucumber
red romaine lettuce
french brocade marigold (to keep the bugs away)
nasturtium (to keep the bugs away)

Box 2:

double rich slicing tomato
yellow pear tomato
sweet chocolate pepper
white sage
greek oregano
english thyme
purple dark opal basil
burgundy amaranth
dragon carrot
(generic) carrot
french brocade marigold (to keep the bugs away)
nasturtium (to keep the bugs away)

Although I haven’t seen a lot of rabbit activity around, I’m still trying to figure out how best to handle the fencing situation. The peppers also apparently cross-pollinate, so I’ll need to bag them. Fortunately, I still have a couple of weeks to work it all out.

I came home from work today to find ten trees in my mailbox. No, really. I expected them to be small, but somehow imagined they’d be left on the porch by the door. Instead, they came in a long plastic bag; ten sticks about a foot long bundled together with an insulating gel pack around the roots and instructions for planting. On the outside of the bag was a label indicating I should open the package and read the instructions right away, even if I wasn’t planning to plant them immediately. Wanting to be careful with my new trees, I decided it would be safer to use scissors than to rip the bag open, whereupon I promptly snipped the tops off of the tallest two. Oops.

Even my track record so far with the trees already in the yard has not been good. Trying to be a good caretaker, I bought fertilizer spikes this spring; one kind for the evergreens, a different kind for the deciduous. Since we had been talking about moving a couple of the maples, I only spiked half of them… which are now looking decidedly burned. The evergreens, on the other hand, all of which were spiked, are still thriving despite the dehydrating summer I ignorantly put them through last year. Note to self: evergreens are harder to kill.

Mym and I have spent the past several weeks disagreeing over where and how many of these new trees to plant. We eventually settled on four: redbud and dogwood in the street facing side yard, hawthorne and crabapple in the back. Give the rest away to friends and neighbors. Now all we need is a shovel. I’ll be picking one up tomorrow. Maybe I should let Mym do the planting.