Almostgotit.com

Almostgotit’s birthday present:  One humongous heap of steaming, stinking black mulch plus two indentured slaves with shovels for a day.

The three of us planted the things I bought WITH A COUPON the other day, plus the stuff I’d divided or moved from elsewhere (more about that in tomorrow’s post)

 Here’s the scoop on the new guys in the yard:

Encore Azalea, “Autumn Ruby”

Light shade – sun

• Mature height: 2.5 feet Spread: 3 feet
• Blooms spring AND summer, deep ruby single flowers
• Click here for more about Encore Azaleas http://www.encoreazalea.com/encore/index.cfm

Juniper, “Gold Coast

• Evergreen, yellow foliage
• Cold hardiness zones: 3-9
• Light needs: full sun
• Mature height: 3 ft tall, 4 ft wide

Physocarpus, “Summer Wine”

• Light Needs: Sun
• Cold hardiness zone: 4-9
• Height: 5-6 feet; Spread 5-6 feet
• Wine red foliage ; white-pink flowers mid-summer

Weigela, “Midnight Wine”

• Light Needs: Sun
• Cold hardiness zone: 5-9
• Height: 12-18 inches; spread 18-24 inches
• Purple foliage, bright pink flowers

Abelia, “Rose Creek”

• Evergreen: leaves become purplish in cold weather.
• Light needs: Full to partial sun
• Cold Hardiness Zone: 6-9
• Light needs: Full to partial sun
• Mature size: Low mounding shrub 2 to 3 ft. tall, 3 to 4 ft. wide.
• Flower Color: White
• Blooms: Fragrant white flowers spring through summer.

But lots of them were on sale, PLUS I had a coupon!!

I’m so excited! 

The Wells Fargo Wagon came down the street yesterday, finally, with my brand new Weed Wrench!

Making me a weed wench today, obviously.

We borrowed weed wrenches from some Americorps volunteers over the summer to remove some invasives in our neighborhood park, and were instantly smitten.  These pups really work, too!

Can’t stop to chat.  The sun is shining and the husband is looking covetous; therefore on a couple counts I’ve got some mighty weed wenching to do…

After harvesting naught but a single mutant cucumber, the Almostgotits have decided to deed the entire northern half of their garden to Sweden.

My twelve year old finds the most interesting internet sites. Over the weekend she found Sketch Star, and so of course I had to try it.

My daughter has her own version of my life, however. . .

Good news!  The utility company has given us a couple months off its billing cycle.  The poor thing still can’t decide how to bill the Almostgotits, as our low meter readings always make it suspicious (we heat with wood).   

The only thing is, we got our woodstove a couple years too early to qualify for Obama’s 30% tax credit for energy efficiency.    Ah well, we ALMOST got it!!

Saving money and saving the planet make wonderful bedfellows, so here’s six ways you can do both, just for today:

1. Hang your laundry out to dry.  If you don’t have a clothes line, buy one or just tie a rope between a couple of trees.  Clothes dryers are one of the biggest consumers of a home’s total energy use.  And yes, you can even hang your clothes up indoors!
2. Skip Starbucks for a day and find an Earth Day event to do instead  (or)
3. Do a fun Earth Day project with your kids at home.
4. Plant a vegetable garden!  Tomatoes and beans are the easiest of all, grow practically anywhere, and your own, home-grown vegetable plants are so gorgeous and satisfying.  Plus also, you’ll have great tasting food for much less than what you’d pay at the store!
5. Stock your freezer.  You’ll save money and energy by reducing your trips to the grocery store.  You’ll also reduce the temptation to eat out (more car trips, more money spent) because you’ll have things to eat at home.  And finally, freezers use less energy when they’re full, too. 
6. Plug your TV into a power bar.  Many appliances draw electricity even when they are turned off, so using a power bar can make a real difference in energy savings.

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Related posts:

5 Ways to work greener & cheaper 

11 Ways to be cheap in honor of Earth Day

Laundry and spring break and blogging: oh my!

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So I got my check from Blogher yesterday — $29.28 for three months worth of ads, which makes it all worthwhile when those pop-up ones come up and bug the heck out of you, doesn’t it? 

(I’m so sorry.  I forgot to sign in and go do the thing that nixes those kinds of ads…)

Anyway, with all that money to spend, I felt a trip to the nursery was finally justified, so I went to Stanley’s Greenhouses and spent $149.47.

Welcome to my sick little world.

I bet Heather Armstrong never feels bad when *she* goes and spends $150 at one of her Salt Lake City nurseries.  She reportedly makes $40,000 a month on advertising for Dooce.com.   Yeah sure, go ahead and click through…  buy her another sagebrush or whatever she can actually grow in Salt Lake City. 

$40K vs. a chance to grow dahlias?  Oh yeah, I’m sure glad *I* didn’t move to Utah. 

Since it was the middle of a weekday when I went to Stanley’s, there weren’t many other people there except retirees and SAHM’s with kids in tow. 

And mostly-unemployed me.  

Most of the time, I’m glad I no longer have kids in tow everywhere I go, as I now can spend all the time I want agonizing over which color of astilbe I want.  But there was one very cute little girl trailing behind as her mother asked around and  hunted in vain for the part of the store that stocked wysteria vines. 

“Mommy,” the little girl called out, growing impatient.  “MOMMY!  So, WHERE’S THAT POSSTERIA?!?”

Right next to the asters, is my bet.

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Related post:
Once Several Times Upon a Mattress

One of my dear friends directs an organization that works with inner city youth. 

These young people are often battered with repeated failures, but Chris believes in them, even when no one else does.  He encourages them to believe in themselves, too.

“Always Begin Again,” he tells them. Over and over.
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I’m helping a woman finish her latest book.  She’s old enough to be my grandmother, but whizzes around the internet like a pro and still hikes in the Andes.  She sent me an email yesterday, along with the latest installment of her manuscript. 

“This is so HARD,” she wrote.

‘But I have a sign up,” she continued, “that says ‘Failure can not tolerate persistence.”  Got it from a wonderful book called The War of Art.’

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Andy is home.  He called me today, and he sounded much better.  People have taken good care of him, so he was calling around to check in,  thank everyone.  His client had paid his hotel bill last night, even though he hadn’t managed to finish their show.  He added that Phillip has had some good days while he was gone, but that he himself hit another rough patch,  coming home this afternoon to the empty house.  

But he already has lots of things set up, lots of meetings with lots of people, for his business and to go over the estate, legal and financial things.   A  lot of mail had piled up while he was gone, too.  I could hear him shuffling through it.  He listed some of it for me:  Paperwork about benefits.  Insurance information for COBRA. 

And the death certificate finally came.  

“And, maybe,” he paused, “a grief counselor or something.  That might be good.”
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There’s a quote on scrap of paper on my desk that I’ve been trying to decide what to do with. It keeps getting shuffled to the top of my piles. I heard it last fall from an arborist who was speaking to our group about how badly our area’s trees had suffered from a year of severe drought, last spring’s late freeze, and a summer of record-setting heat.

Then he smiled. “But,  enough gloom and bad news.  I recommend, as all of us do who have the perpetual gardener’s heart: replant next spring!”

 ”Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
- Søren Kierkegaard

We shamelessly put the kids to work last weekend and “put up” more than half a winter’s worth of heating wood in one day   (3+ cords)  The log splitter doesn’t make wood nearly so pretty as an axe does, nor even as fast, but you can run it all day long – a thing you can’t do with a set of axe-wielding arms. 

Summer rhythm never seems to set in around here until summer is half-way through.  To tell you the truth, I still don’t know how to do it all very well, with kids and work — what there is of it — and Everything Else never quite fitting into whatever time we’ve allotted for it. 

Here, surely, is part of the solution, though.  Living, green things.  This is part of our whiskey barrel garden (hic) which we fenced off and built on what used to be the end of our driveway.  

It is wonderfully peaceful to get up in the morning when it is still cool and stand over the cucumbers or beans with a hose.  Everything smells good in the morning, too.

Later in the day, when Everything Else gets to be too much, I can slip out the back door without telling anyone to dump some stuff into the compost bin, lean into the barrels to pluck a few weeds, see how the volunteer tomatoes are doing, or rifle through the foliage to see if it’s time to pick the beans again. 

It’s not highly-productive time, it’s Being Time.  And I’ve (almost) learned that I can’t live without it.

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Related posts:
Chapter two-ing 
In defense of thoughts