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In Reply to: always love your stories posted by Acheick on September 18, 2005 at 00:06:32:
Well, maybe some of the trip south this year could be California - maybe.
Yes, it's nice to have a base, an anchor, a retreat and so many wonderful spiritual things can happen while reflecting or puttering around in the yard. Personally, I feel I'm a better missionary here at home than I ever was 'out there,' honestly.
Fran has researched the soil components of gardenning her flowers and has found a great mix of compost, manure, soil, etc., and her plants are THRIVING - like she is now. I guess she's found the right mix for her own life too. She has divided up the yard into 'garden rooms' (little areas that she can work on one at a time.) She bought a bunch of landscape ties and has built 3 beautiful raised flowerbeds around the white ash and hazelnut trees and then went on to build an additional 2 beautiful raised rose gardens with 3 roses in each, one for each kid. (There's a rotting stump amongst a few of the ash trees for me - hee hee. Actually, last year, I put a beautiful rusty old blue cook pot on that stump and it produced georgeous flowers but the pot got a paint job this year (boo hoo - I thought it added a touch of rustic class) and a relocation so the stump now abides alone. It's her yard just like your life is your story and I have to respect that.
She had the spruce trees along the ditch taken down as their roots were going to be a problem for her strawberry, rasberry and saskatoon berry garden that she had me plow up in the heat of the summer. It's 70' x 20'. Now she's bought posts and post anchors and gone ahead with building a lattice fence along the length of it. The fence will hide the road and the town maintennace yard as we view it from the deck, block the wind that tends to knock over her roses and hide the view of my garage from the road as the passeres-by pass by. (the garage has an 'under construction' type of excuse for the clutter I leave round about it.)
I took the tractor and the plow, the cultivator, and the blade and dug her a 16'x 36' pond alongside the greenhouse the other day. I pushed the mud up into a hill which she is going to build into a cascading waterfall. She's waiting to buy the liner for the pond and will then 'garden this room' with brick and mortar and what have you. The liner, itself, is pretty costly and I doubt she'll get it layed this fall so I suggested she bring in a bit of sand to create the liner bed and fill the pond with water now until such time as she can afford the liner, but no, the liner comes first. I suggested that the hole in the ground was going to fill with rain water and future snow melt and that it would be impossible to put the tractor on it again until next August (after a pump out and a time to dry) to line it with sand, that now was the time. But what does an old farmer like me know? One way or another, it'll come together and it will be BEAUTIFUL! It'll draw a whole lot of birds too.
Gotta run, will finish up with my great blue heron story later. Thanks for your personable stories too. They're GREAT! Hi to Bob - steak would be fine! Hee hee!
