Well, I've got plenty of work in me but (as I mentioned before) I'm cheap and trees are expensive. Seriously, go to Lowe's or Home Depot. Trees are like $40 just for some little sapling that you have to nurture carefully and hope it doesn't keel over and die on you right away. Let's examine this phenomenon for a minute (this'll sound a bit like Bill Cosby here): Trees grow NATURALLY all over the world- with literally no help from human beings. But we brilliant, capitalistic, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses suburbanites go and BUY them from stores and then study books and web sites to learn how to care for something that would normally care for itself quite nicely.
No way- not this family. We are not about to spend money on something that grows in abundance within 1/4 mile of my house. In fact, there used to be a nice one growing in my neighbor's yard and now it's growing nicely in mine. Just kidding- I didn't swipe any trees from my neighbors. I bundled up the twins and Seth and we snagged one from a nearby forest. OK, so I didn't really "bundle" them up, since it was every bit of 187 degrees outside today- I put summer hats and loose shoes on them, stuck them in the wagon, and pulled that sucker about a mile total through some off-road sweetness.
Seth was so helpful- first he pointed out a lovely weed. When I told him that wasn't even a tree, he began to get the picture. He next pointed out the most gnarled, stunted little thing on the side of the trail- it would have made Charlie Brown proud. I told him we wanted a tree that would look nice in front of our house. So, he pointed out (I know, you see it coming a mile away) a massive hulk of a tree that might have made a Southern lumberjack cry. I told him I would have a little trouble carrying it, but he assured me I could do it. I can't tell you how flattered I was that he really thought I could just haul off some 2-ton mass of scrub pine. I therefore cleverly hid my ineptitude by telling him that I COULD do it, but he'd have to pull the wagon with the babies all the way back to the house so that I could get the tree. He decided we should press on and find something smaller.
And find something smaller we did. It was on the edge of the trail, which will make Grammy happy because I didn't "abandon [her] babies" while I chopped down the cherry tree. It had a couple of large roots which were a little tricky, but all in all the thing came along without too much of a fight.
We brought the thing back home in a bucket, but we had to wait for the babies to go down for their nap before we could dig the hole for it. And when Seth and I went to dig the hole, we discovered that the combination of "sandhills" soil conditions, coupled with the recent drought had conspired against us to create a close approximation to concrete in our front yard. I poured water on it and that loosened things up enough to dig down with a shovel and spade. We excavated, measured, excavated, and measured again until we had a perfect hole for our asymmetrically-rooted friend. Because it took so long to haul back and to dig a hole, the poor thing is looking a little parched at the moment. I fear we'll lose those nice leaves but we're hoping for a new set of buds in a while.
And here it is in our front yard:
If this works, we are SO going tree hunting again. Our yard will go from patchy to hair-plug heaven! But don't worry- I never will! I'm retired from hair.
P.S. Getting a HEAD start on Arbor Day... Get it? HEAD?! Ha! ;-)
