Diggin' up bones

There is a blister on my right thumb. It makes me exceedingly happy, not because I like blisters generally, but because it serves as a badge of honor and a tangible reminder that I did something useful yesterday that was also great fun.

Alicia has a yard. She likes pretty trees and plants, and likes to do her own digging and cultivating. That being the case, we got to spend a whole afternoon shopping for plants at North Haven Gardens and carted them home in my little Mazda3. She even got a tree! Granted, a very young tree, although I think it would have been hilarious to get a bigger tree and have it stick out through the sun roof. The place was great, and I went into little kid run-around-touching-and-looking-at-everything mode. I even called my mom to inform her of this locale, as she is a full blown plantaholic who is always looking for a place to get a fix. Currently I have been trying to convince her that we need to plant an assortment of ground hugging plants between the flagstones in the backyard back home, and I think it's going to happen. Yay!

Alicia had been preparing for planting for a while now, and had some pretty new garden tools and even a set of new guest gardening gloves available for my use. In addition to the purchases of the day, she also had some flats of begonias and petunias awaiting their meeting with destiny. The weather was perfect for our endeavour, being cool and sunny and downright gorgeous. We worked on a couple of large concrete planters first off, loosening and composting the soil to prep it for the addition of some lovely mandevillas. For some reason, there were large chunks of flagstone buried in both, so it felt like a mini treasure hunt everytime we found one.

Now, there is a spiffy garden tool known as the Garden Claw, which will henceforth be known as THE CLAW. Because that's how I think of it, and that's how I say it. It is awesome! She's had it for a while, and it even has an infomercial. It is possibly one of the best outlets for excess energy of any kind that I have ever encountered. I mean, you essentially tear through the soil with almost manic glee, smashing through hardened clods and ripping out unwanted vegetation, but the end result produces beautifully composted earth that begs to be planted. You destroy and create, all at once!

During the course of using THE CLAW, I encountered a cable. I became subdued immediately, because I don't like mystery cables. Some are important, and some are just trash, but usually I can't tell the difference. In this case, it turned out to be... Christmas lights. That were for some reason buried 4 inches underground. Why? Who knows. We lacked the patience to dig up the whole thing, so we merely tore out what we could and proceeded with THE CLAW.

We did good. All plants were accounted for, and additional planning is already in the works by Alicia for her next planting day, which will take place in the front yard. The baby Japanese maple still awaits it's home in the ground, but in the meantime is still living in it's pot. It's time will come soon enough.