Gaia Bows to my Skilz
October 27th, 2008Her Bugs and Fungi are no Match for my Gardening Kung Fu
I am a gardening juggernaut.
I got me a second Key lime tree. I feel like they’re free; Home Depot is charging like 20% of what slightly bigger ones cost at nurseries last year. And Home Depot’s trees are much nicer.
Home Depot is generally a bad place to buy fruit trees, because they have a pathetic selection. No mameys, plantains, guavas, papayas, or other worthwhile tropical stuff. But they do okay with citrus.
A funny thing happened while I was unloading the tree. A crew was doing something or other across the street with a lo-boy and a backhoe, and one of the guys came over and offered to put in a hole for me. Didn’t say anything about money. I was too startled to take him up on it, and there was another consideration. If someone does something for you free of charge, there is a limit to how much you can holler at him to get it right. No, I’ll go out tomorrow before the sun gets hot, and I’ll put it in the ground myself.
I had a problem with some ornamental flowers by the door; I didn’t have enough of them, and they vanished from the market for a year. While I was shopping today, I noticed that they were back. Now I got that fixed. Finally.
While I was looking for a good bag of excrement to buy, I learned that excrement comes in different quality levels. There was an ad thing over by the Black Kow manure display, cautioning me on the deficiencies of inferior manure. So I bought the real thing. Evidently the cheap stuff is only part manure. The rest is old Band-Aids and Run, Hillary, Run stickers that have been put through a grinder.
I paid good money for dirt again. I put about 400 pounds of it in an area where the dirt had simply gotten up and walked away.
I poisoned the snails and ants one more time. You just can’t poison them enough. This morning I found a carpenter ant with me in the shower. Explain that. Seems like every time I poison them, we have two days of torrential rain which carries the poison away. It’s sunny today and the humidity is an incredible 48%, so I took advantage.
I washed the front of the place with a Windex product which works pretty well.
Now I have to go out and build little mesh shields for the tree trunks, because it has become obvious that different illegal aliens are mowing the yard every time, and it is pointless to tell them to quit cutting into the bark with weedeaters. Someone needs to invent a device that grabs the weedeater line, rips it out of the machine, and sends a giant shock up into the illegal wielding it.
I can’t believe all the stuff I’m getting done. Maybe in ten years the difference will be apparent.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:57 PM
I use pieces of corrugated plastic to protect small trees. You can buy them here,
http://www.nelsonplastic.com/tree_guards.html
or just get a piece of corrugated drain pipe and make your own. if you cut a short section and then slit the side, it just snaps around a small tree trunk and protects it.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:43 PM
The sun isn’t going to get “hot” tomorrow in S FL. We will be lucky to see 70 deg. Unless the weatherman is lying.
I bet my birds would love to spend tomorrow on the lanai.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:45 PM
Seventy is hot when you’re in the sun, digging a hole in dirt which is full of rocks.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:27 PM
I have this image of you on the roof, holding spraybottles like pistols, shouting “death! death!” and “who wants some?” at the lawn.
October 27th, 2008 at 6:52 PM
There’s an election coming up and your talking about filling garden pests?
Steve! Wake up! Get upset! You can be a Christian and still be upset about the course this thing is taking and …
Waitaminnit. You know something don’t you? You’re not telling us something. What is it?
October 27th, 2008 at 7:09 PM
Planting fruit trees and filling the holes with low-quality excrement is no way to go through life, son.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:53 PM
There is a device that convinces illegals not to cut the bark with a weedwacker.
It is called a bullwhip.
It has other advantages as well, using one is excellent exercise and a lot of fun. Imagine how cool you’ll look with your bullwhip with it’s popper stained with illegal blood coiled menacingly on your shoulder. None of your trees ever need fear an illegal with a weedwacker again.
Gerry N.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:06 PM
I’d like to see some before-and-after pictures.
How much sun do the key limes require indoors?
October 27th, 2008 at 9:57 PM
To paraphrase ghostbusters: If a guy with a back-hoe offers to dig you a hole – YOU SAY YES!
You must be part yankee – “No, don’t trouble yourself on my behalf. I should do the work myself.” Sounds like a midwesterner
October 28th, 2008 at 1:22 AM
Cow poop is a way to get rid of industrial waste. Something called “fly-ash”, which I think is incinerator ash. It’s probably a good source of minerals, cuz… that’s what ash is, minerals that did not fly away during the fire. But I’d suspect “fly-ash” to contain a lot of heavy metals. Ground-up dry wall (aka gypsum) is a common additive to cow poop too. Ground up Masonite too. Some friends of mine have a farm in Sacramento County, and a neighbor of theirs makes fertilizer for sale, and that’s what he uses. I’m sure there’s some liberal tax credit for recycling in there.