I
haven’t been in the garden for a long time - not since the end of August or
first part of September. I injured my
arm and had trouble with it for months and months.
It turned out to be a pinched nerve rather than muscle strain and finally got
itself un-pinched. Thank goodness! The moral of this story is that there hasn’t
been any gardening done all that time.
Then
- the weekend before Christmas we had an ice storm in Oklahoma. It was a doozie! I've posted pictures of the ice at our house; these are from Mom's place.
The sage and the thyme survived nicely and looked beautiful in ice.
The centerpiece of our flowerbeds - the redbud tree - split and
toppled.
A few smaller branches were
hanging brokenly -
mostly resting on bird feeders.
Rob,
the handyman extraordinaire, came when the weather warmed up and cut everything
down to a two-foot stump. Younger
Brother came to get that last bit for the lathe-turned ballpoint pens that his
woodshop class makes.
When
the weather warms up again, Rob will get a stump grinder to remove the
roots, then we’ll plant a flowering shrub
in the middle to replace the tree. It
surely will be missed. The Redbud was
old, had lost a lot of its branches until it was more sculpture than full tree. Just the way we liked it.
So,
I guess I’ll be starting over with the garden this year.
That’s ok.
I get to dig in the dirt.
~~~Why a shrub? 'Cause I'm in my sixties and Mom is in her eighties. We can't wait around for a tree to grow.