Digging It with the Primrose Posse

There has been a flurry of activity about the place today. Mimi and Grampy are coming tomorrow, along with Auntie Sue, Uncle Victor and cousins Aubrey and Garrett, and the house is being savagely beaten into cleanly submission. This includes a long-needed overhaul of a couple of our flowerbeds and the planting of some long-coveted citrus trees.

Around 9:00 this morning I loaded up the kids and went to a couple of nurseries and stalked up on chlorophyll. (Stacy stayed home and scrubbed and vacuumed the house in a fevered cleaning frenzy.) I did my shopping without the crippling guilt I usually have buying plants. In years gone by I was sorely oppressed by the sad knowledge that, with the ringing of the cashier's register, any plant purchased by me had formally entered its final days (rarely weeks) of happy vegetative life. It was a rare veggie indeed that still had a sickly green frond at the one month mark. But now, with a wife with a green forearm, and more importantly - an automatic watering system! - my plant purchases actually have a fighting change of maturing beyond the seedling stage.

Stacy, evidently on the Weeders Support and Counseling Hotline

Once we got home it was it was shovels to the dirt! Stacy and L were in charge of the hanging baskets, while N and I assaulted the north flowerbeds. I dug up the weedy stuff we wanted to pitch, while N pulled the leaves off all the things we wanted to keep. For some unexplained reason Stacy's orchids and calla lilies go gang-busters on that side of the house. I actually had to dig up thirty or so calla lily volunteers because they had so taken over the bed. In their place went some hostas, a cyclamid or two, and a healthy sprinkling of primroses.

As we worked the beds we turned over countless earthworms, much to the children's delight. L demanded I alert her to each new worm discovered and on each sighting she would run over and rescue the afflicted invertebrate. She would then take a leaf (hopefully one that N had already pillaged and not a fresh victim), pat a layer of dark dirt on it, and shove the bewildered worm onto it - a worm bed. If I found a particularly small worm we would have to stop all gardening and just dig until a big "mommy worm" could be found to comfort the toddler. As the time went on I noticed N's lips getting dirtier and began to get concerned. I was somewhat, but not fully comforted when I got him to assure me that he wasn't eating the worms, but only kissing them.

At one point N got all excited because he found a worm on his own. He kept it in his tightly clenched fist for an hour, talking to it and letting it eat leaves and other assorted worm appetizers. At some point he decided he needed his hand for something and asked me to hold his worm. What he dropped in my hand, however, was not an earthworm, but some vile, semi-translucent, maggoty larva that he had been cuddling with the whole time. Stacy, fortunately had gone in the house before I made that discovery. She would not have reacted well.

Once the beds were done and my garden gnomes well worn out and in their own flowerbeds, I tucked all the beached earthworms I could find back into the planter and went around to the south yard by myself to do some heavy digging and terraforming. That yard is pretty much out of sight from the street and all the yard areas we generally use, so it has been relegated to be our throw-away yard for the last couple of years. With cinder blocks and old toys and a half-dozen rusting barbeque grills and smokers hiding among the shoulder-high weeds and junk grass, it screams "redneck!"

I've been planning on reclaiming the area for God and country for a while now, and I actually starting digging it up and pulling out the weeds a couple of weeks ago. I buried a couple more hours digging and raking this afternoon and now have it about two-thirds of the way done - done enough to plant the two citrus trees I'd finally let myself buy at the nursery this morning. A semi-dwarf Oro Blanco grapefruit and a dwarf Meyer lemon now grace the cleared stretch, with a newly installed run of the sprinkler system to keep them from going the way of all flora.

Our throw-away yard about a year ago.

Today: Our soon-to-be citrus orchard.

I am trying not to think about how it will be two or three years, at best, before I can expect anything to come of them, but I'm nevertheless quite proud of my soon-to-be monstrous citrus harvests. (The remaining one-third of the yard yet to be cleared will house a navel orange as soon as I can get to it.)

Bloom, baby, bloom! Daddy needs some lemonade!