4/8/12: Freaked Out!

What a wild week in the garden! Roofers are re-shingling the porch roof and all the towers, and we’ve worked around each other pretty well. I duck under ladders and avoid flying roof junk, humming as I clean.

Then, on Wednesday, a mini-disaster.

I’d been prying out ten zillion maple tree helicopters and testosteroned weeds, and pruning clematis vines in the main secret garden. There’s a monstrous pile of debris in the alley, making it almost impossible to park the car out there. The garage’s interior is a mess, because the North Gate’s massive garden door is being tweaked. An electric sander, cords, stain, rags and massive hinges are scattered about, mingling with stacked bags of Wholly Cow poop, and suchlike.
Spring at Sunnybank is always like this.
Barely controlled chaos.

Well. I finally started trimming back the clematis in the front garden - and gasped. !!!Mites!!! were dining on the ten lovely columnar arborvites it climbed on. Awww! Garden-y disasters have an irritating tendency to happen while I’m making other plans. This was a major setback.

Spraying the few nits they’d had last year clearly hadn’t helped. I wailed my despair, oblivious to the stares of curious passersby.
If I didn’t adapt immediately, my established Clematis terniflora would have nothing to scramble along. It would complain, then sigh - and die in the dirt.

I stumped off to the garage. Les, a tall, dust-gray ghost, was poised over the saw-horsed door, sanding away eighteen years of grime. I finger-slashed my throat, the classic turn-it-off sign, and out came verbal diarrhea.

“I need more fence right now, today, immediately, because I have mites – a bad case, and they’re spreading – and the impatient clematis is already fifteen feet long and waving around looking for support and I can’t offer any so we need to go to Home Depot and get posts and dig holes - four, I think, for thirty-two feet of fence to build quickly – those mites weren’t supposed to return!!!”

Mites? Warily he stepped back, but looked closer. Uh-oh. I looked undone, with dry twiglets hanging from my rumpled jacket and hat-mussed hair. A saw-toothed weed dangled from my wedding ring. Clotted dirt clung to jeaned knees, and pruners hung from my back pocket. My face and gesticulating hands were a muddy study - Jeez. I presented the perfect portrait of an old hen freaking out.

“Whoa. Start over!”
Red-eyed, I explained again, more coherently.

“Lets have a look…
Yep. You do have Mites. Lots.”

A long, thoughtful silence settled in as we paced the front lawn pondering the problem from every angle. My mite-racked arbs sat there, not realizing they were history.

I ran inside for a pad and pencil. Design solutions went from wild to wildly creative, before moving toward clarity.

A board fence. Lower. Same simple lines.

Making ourselves visually acceptable we trundled off to Home Depot to think in situ and make more skeleton-sketches. From these we birthed a sturdy fence that wouldn’t make my wallet wail.

I rented their truck. $19.00 for one hour. Perfect. We loaded it with material and drove home. Unloaded. Returned the truck. Three hours later Les created that vital first panel, and stained it. While it dried he removed the first two eight-foot tall trees and dug the first posthole.

I coaxed the disgruntled clematis into clinging to a makeshift support for one more night. Tomorrow it’ll be seated in the sun atop a new fence section, ready to go nuts. And I’ll sigh with relief.

I stumbled into the kitchen about six o’clock, exhausted, full of splinters and rose thorns, and smeared with dirt. But my teeth gleamed. For now, problem solved.

Gardeners – and farmers – certainly lead precarious lives…

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