A Day in the Garden

I tried to talk to Squeak this morning, but he didn't have time for me: he was busy making his bed.  I came back a few minutes later, but no dice.  He was still busy making his bed.  After all that diligent bed making, I had to laugh when I saw the finished results. I made sure Squeak was out of earshot first.

Walker and I found our red oak tree.  We brought him home in the convertible with the top down. That was a fun ride. The tree people don't get many requests to load fifteen foot trees into the back of convertibles, but they wrapped the canopy up and we got him home safe. 

After we dropped the tree off, I took Walker out for brunch.  He's seemed stressed lately.   He didn't have much to say, but I'm pretty sure that having extra people in the house, including the kids, is taking a toll.  I told him, if there is something specific bugging him, just say so and we would try to fix it.  Time will tell if he does.  Really, he's more likely to just stew about it.  I hope he starts speaking up.  I have to say, it was a nice treat to have a meal together that I didn't have to cook or clean up. 

After brunch we went home to plant the tree but then Walker decided to get some tree rings, then he wanted to fill the rings with bark mulch, then he wanted to back fill the tree hole with compost so while he was running around buying supplies and filling the compost bucket at the city compost pile I used the time to do some much needed garden grooming. 

It's been a while since I spent an afternoon gardening. I cleared out dead leaves and sticks from the storm last week.  I put a new coco mat in the hanging basket.  It looks better but with the contrast of the new coco mat you can really tell how badly bent up the hanging basket got during the tornado.  I don't really get weeds in the flower beds, thanks to bark mulch and a bit of Preen sprinkled about in the spring, but there were spent blossoms to dead head and some careful pruning to be done.  It looks much better now, groomed and healthy.

Diva asked for a rose bush to be planted outside her bedroom window, and I noticed one at the back of the garden wasn't doing well, so I moved out some hyacinth bulbs and brought in the rosebush.  It just has a couple wimpy little leaves on it.  I'm not sure it will survive.  But if not there are half a dozen more and we can move one of those.  We're going to call this photo the "before" shot.  Hopefully there will be blooms on this little guy before frost.