Defoliating a victory garden sure does work up an appetite.

[captainsblog]

I must say, after over 20 years of living with an orthodox gardener, that it all seems cyclical to me. Not that Simba-and-Mufasa circle of life shit, but just how much of the process is undoing stuff you already did, so you can do more stuff which, as likely as not, you're just gonna undo in a couple of years anyway.

Maybe women "get" this more than I do, since their wardrobes tend to go through the same process.

When we moved here, the front and back yard were basically fairways. Some yews lined the front walkway, there was (and still is) a black walnut tree in the corner of the back yard and a mite of shrubbery near the back patio, but otherwise, you could pretty much putt your brains out fore and aft (which is what the original owner, separated from us by only one other couple's brief residency of about two years, preferred to use hisour yards for).

To Eleanor, this was the functional equivalent of making me not only attend a Yankee game, but actually move into their stadium. My head would explode. So over those ensuing years, both yards have been built up beyond anything Mr. Costello would ever recognize. Berms and arbors and paths and beds now occupy more than a third of the once virgin sod. Most of them, and several grassy areas, have also been treed over these years. They range from tiny maple to soaring redwood; some were professionally planted, some (like the maple, our tribute to Kathy) simple transplants of self-seeded babies from around the yard, and my only significant contribution, a pin oak from around 2000, which I bought solely to fill a gaping hole once anchoring an outdoor clothesline and which is now the most majestic tree in the whole yard.

Not all the foliage has been so lucky. And so it happened that these past two weeks, on my beloved's only two days off, she's been pruning and digging and, in one case, outright uprooting the fruits (no vegetables that I know of) of her past hard labors. Each of the past two Thursday mornings, all four of our own yard-waste-only garbage cans, plus three of our neighbor's (yes, Sally, you'll get them back someday) have gone out to the curb full of dead, mostly dead, and not dead yet things, only to be re-filled within a day or so for the following week's Bring Out Your Dead Day.

The only remaining dead-izens of the back berm were the stump of one dead tree (RIP 8/20/08) at one end, and the every-third-branch-not-dead condition of a hemlock tree at the other end.  These were my task for the afternoon, and they have been well and truly walloped, placed in the last of Sally's cans, and await the town truck of doom on Thursday (or is it Friday this week?) morning.

Now all I have to do is fetch her a shrubbery to plant there in their place.