Midsummer

It was 103° Fahrenheit at 9:45AM today and I was out with my new best friend, the arborist from Michigan who works for our realtor’s husband, whacking at three overgrown plum trees. And more. He’s a funny guy with his head on right and a LOT of experience with plants and chopping things down – and you should see him when he gets into a red-ant pile. White people CAN dance! We got him brushed-off real quick though.
Two of the plums shade the narrow driveway entrance, and the other is merely “decorative,” up the hill by the “front-door” – on the cockeyed side of the house. IMHO the house is sited weirdly, based on an equatorial rather than longitudinal sun exposure. Or something.
At some point about five years ago – before the immediate predecessor owners, somebody had made an effort to prune them, but since then nothing whatsoever, and the plants’ interiors had grown into their own wild criss-crossing jungle thicket – and into the overhead power-lines. The artistic hand of the arborist had also been busy and felt at the Dogwood tree-shrub underneath and outside the master bedroom, and we had cut-back its neighboring companion, a leggy verbena, with a seriously hard, high, and tight Marine Corp haircut. We butchered it.
Or whatever.
As a certified non-plant person and guaranteed Black Thumb, a lot of this was really kinda new to me. Besides the deadly familiarity with loping shears, I’m not very plant sensitive or green-caring. Don’t ask me to water your petunias or I’ll drown them – if I even ever get around to applying water in any form. A motorcyclist friend who soundly thrashes his bikes to the last inch describes his personal vehicular tendency as a profound lack of “mechanical sympathy.” I’m the same with vegetation and plant-things that purport to “grow.”
Yesterday we were were out there too, but it was only 95° degrees at 8:30AM when I was out digging into the #2 hillock making sure it was not hiding a stump, or gold – but no such luck, it was only a crap-pile of alluvial gravels. Or an old midden-pile. Some of the dirt “clung” together… But no buried treasure.
In fact the little hill looked for all purposes like the dump site for excess crap-dirt that was mostly rock, so I filled the dumper-trailer (TWICE) with such crap-dirt and drove over to fill-in the ankle-breaker hole. Big sweat.
No explanation for the knee-deep, manhole-sized cavity in the prairie, but who knows. Then I bent to work on the second hillock to fill the long rut running along the fence line.
So yesterday’s work included a preliminary whack-job, and the stump grinding. Three of the stumps were so old and dry the simply blew-up, expediting the process. On required actual work – which fortunately was in the shade of the big oak.
And on Sunday before all this got started, I set-up two fresh and clean bluebird houses, on trees facing each other across the prairie. We have a number of bluebirds out in the4 surroundings, and the inch-and-a-half hole is designed to attract them. And they eat a lot of mosquitoes, which is AWESOME.