New Beginnings

So, as promised, I return for yet another weekend post! That’s something that might become a more common occurrence in the coming weeks, as things pick up at school and I become progressively more brain-dead by the end of the day. Just sayin’.

Anyhow, yesterday I left off with us having dug up one dead cherry tree and left with an empty hole in the ground. Usually I’m totally fine with leaving things half-finished (kitchen cabinets, anyone?) but for some reason that empty hole really depressed me. I simply couldn’t wait. Off to Home Depot we went. However, when we arrived in the garden section, happily anticipating hauling home a baby tree of our own, we were saddened to see that the whole garden center had been practically cleared out of trees! We could either have a mangled arborvitae or a stunted magnolia. Hmmm…not what we were imagining when we set out on our little adventure.

Feeling extremely disheartened, we made do with a bag of tulip bulbs and were in the process of dragging our sorry butts home when—There they were! Turns out that the HD folks hadn’t gotten rid of them, they’d just moved all the trees out front and around the corner, completely out of sight of the entrance but only two steps from the exit. The selection here was much better and after much hemming and hawing we decided on this guy:

A flowering “winter king” hawthorn. Lovely, eh? Only…uh, it doesn’t look quite like that just yet. It looks more like this…

Kind of scrawny, right? However, Denny thinks that its lack of leaves is most likely due to it having been stuck in the middle of a bunch of other trees, resulting in a very sparse middle and a leafier top. However, if it turns out that we’re wrong and its leaflessness is due to something else, HD has a one year guarantee on all plants, so we’ll be able to get our money back. And until then, we’ve lovingly dubbed it “our Charlie Brown tree.”

So, I’ve been living under the impression that tree planting is really strenuous work. Actually, I’ve been living under the idea that any type of planting is tough. Turns out that planting trees (or maybe just tree, singular) is really easy.

Step 1) Dig hole.

Step2) Position tree. Make sure it’s centered and straight up and down.

Step 3) Throw some of this stuff in with the tree roots to fertilize:

Step 4) Have your husband do some move shoveling, because God knows he hasn’t done enough shoveling today to last him a lifetime.

Step 5) Observe and record as Husband finishes filling giant hole with dirt. This is a very important step (right?).

At this point, you could skip right ahead to Step 6, which is level soil and water liberally. However, remember that bag of bulbs that I dejectedly bought earlier? Well, there was all that lovely fertilized dirt (I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth/computer) and since I was in a planting mood (instead of a “ripping things out” mood for a change) I took advantage of the moment and stuck a bunch of bulbs in the dirt. Denny helped.

Of course, these won’t come up until next spring, but it’s still really exciting for some reason. Hopefully Mom’s squirrels won’t dig them up before they can do whatever it is that bulbs do on their way to becoming flowers (I call them “Mom’s” because she feeds them when she comes to visit and has even asked about their wellbeing on occasion…)

After our bulb planting, we went back to Step 6 and this was the lovely result. We love him. So much that we should probably give him a name. Wait! And he will be my squishy and I will call him Squishy! Squishy, Squishy, Squishy! (Oh, pardon me. There’s a chance I’m a little more tired than I thought…)