Quite The Spring Garden Cleanup You Fellas Are Doing There

Like many people in the northern half of the nation, I'm got my spring garden cleanup going on at the moment.

For most of us, that means getting rid of dead leaves, freshening the soil, planting new stuff and just generally making things tidy. 

This guy, though, takes it to a whole new, fun level.  Love the look on the other guy's face as he watches: 

Dumb Homeowners Wanted View; Now Face $1.6 Million Fine and Their Houses Might Slide Down A Hill

Homeowners face huge fines for cutting down trees
on city owned land to improve the views. Plus, cutting the trees
has increased the risk of landslides that could wreck these homes.   

Everybody wants a million dollar view.

Especially if its from their million dollar house.  

Some people in a West Seattle, Washington neighborhood cut down about 150 big leaf maple trees and Scouler willows because the vegetation was blocking their spectacular views.

Here's the problem: The trees were not on their property. It was on city land. And nobody got permission to cut down the trees, says The Stranger,  a Seattle area alternative paper. (and a very good one!)

Now the city has filed two lawsuits in King County, Washington Superior Court, seeking $1.6 million in damages.

Ouch.

A bigger ouch, according to The Stranger, is why the city planted the trees in the first place. The steep hill on which the trees were growing is prone to landslides. The city figured, correctly, that the trees' roots would help hold the hillside in place.

Now that the trees are gone, there's an increased danger that the hillside, and the houses owned by the people who wanted the views, will slide down the hill during any of Seattle's notoriously rainy winters.

At least before the houses slide down the hill and/or the homeowners are bankrupted by the lawsuits against them, they can at least enjoy their spectacular views of Puget Sound and downtown Seattle.

Still don't think it was worth it, though.

The Stranger also reports that lots of people are doing incredibly stupid things with trees to get better views from the hilly Seattle area.    

Ugly, dangerous regrowth on a
tree that had been "topped" to improve views

One thing their doing is topping trees, which means lopping off the branches of a tree to make it much shorter than it was.

This idea of topping a tree always backfires spectacularly. You could kill the tree, or if not, cause all kinds of other problems.

In part because the trees still have a great big root system, new branches come right back and grow back more quickly and much thicker, meaning the view would soon be even more blocked than before the tree topping.

Trees that has been topped are also less stable. The new branches are weaker, the extra foliage is heavier, so the formerly topped trees are more likely to topple over onto nearby houses during storms.

Well, that's one way to improve your view. If a tree falls through your roof, you'll have a nice view of the sky from your living room, right?

Gardeners Lose It, (Hilariously!) And Shake Off A Reluctant Spring

Gardener's Supply employees try
desperately to shake off winter.

Astronomical spring arrives here in Vermont today, but you'd never know it.

There's still snow on the ground. After a wintry start this morning with temperatures in the single digits, readings are forecast to barely make it above freezing this afternoon.

It's supposed to snow tomorrow, the first full day of spring.
 
Many of us are not happy about this. Especially gardeners. This is a post about how the lack of spring can drive people a bit batty, but in a really hilarious fashion.

And I do mean fashion. Unique fashion.

I work at a company called Gardener's Supply, a Burlington based, employee-owned company, which, as the name implies, sells all the stuff you need to get your garden going and thriving.

The job is a great gig, especially for a guy like me, who likes to dig around in garden dirt and see what he can come up with.

Pretty much everyone else who works at Gardener's Supply is a gardener too, so there's a very palpable level of frustration at the office and the retail stores about how this spring just isn't doing it so far.

Yeah, we're going a little crazy.

Which might explain the video you'll definitely want to watch at the bottom of this post. It's a reworked version of Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" that Taylor surely never thought she'd see.

But, gardeners can be inventive, so there you go.

The colorful tutu like things everybody in the video is wearing over their white long johns are called  Tub Trugs. Most people use them as handy, durable buckets for hauling veggies in from the garden, a place to put weeds as your pulling them, or for storing just about anything.

I have a few Tub Trugs. A couple are for the garden.  I use one of them as a laundry basket.  A customer I talked with ordered six Tub Trugs from me, because she said her goats like to play with them. So yeah, at the risk of sounding like I'm from the Shameless Commerce Division, you can use Tub Trugs for anything.

However, I was never imaginative enough to envision cutting out the bottoms of tub trugs and using them as mini skirts of sorts for a music video.  Gotta hand it to the creative department at Gardener's Supply, I tell ya.

The fashion world is fickle, though, so I don't know if we'll see on Project Runway the white long underwear, the Tub Trug tutus and the colorful gardener wellie boots the people in the video are wearing.

But you never know.

The Tub Trug tutus are fun, but I admit I'm relieved to learn that they won't become part of the Gardener's Supply Official Employee Dress Code.

The video is something else, but it is a good way to shake off the nervous energy of waiting, and waiting and WAITING for spring.

Eventually, spring will arrive, and we'll all get a bit less crazy. We'll go back to using Tub Trugs for hauling all of our planting tools out to the garden, instead of wearing them as strange fashion statements.

The video seems to have struck a chord among the legions of winter weary, based on the long list of positive comments on Facebook and the general reaction to this.

The video is a nice goofy break from the winter cold, and maybe it's some sort of dance to the weather gods or something that would beseech them to bring on spring.  And quickly.

You be the judge. Here's the video:

Winter, Spring..It Keeps Changing Within Minutes. I'm Confused

I found some lettuce growing in my garden
today. A little weird for northern Vermont at
the end of December.  

A couple weeks ago, we had an epic snowstorm where I live in St. Albans, Vermont.

Snowstorms are de rigueur in a Vermont December, of course.

This one was different. Instead of the nice, powdery, fluffy snow we're used to in Vermont, this was a wet slush coming down from the skies.

It had the consistency of wet cement. That wet cement snapped zillions of trees and cut power to a lot of people who live here. Some people had no power for a week.

With that snow, which piled up to about 16 inches deep in my yard, I figured winter was here to stay. At least until March.

Fast forward to the day or two after Christmas. Today.

It's been above freezing for a week, and daytime temperatures have gotten as high as the 50s.

Today, my yard looked like it normally does in the beginning of November. Or early April. Spring! 

And yes, I was weeding my garden today. In Vermont.
Go figure.  

So I acted like it was the beginning of November. Or April.

I finally got around to raking the autumn leaves. I weeded the garden. I found some tasty lettuce in the garden.  

I worked in a light jacket. I worked up a sweat.

At the end of December. When I should be freezing my tush off.

It's just strange that lately in Vermont, and here's the latest example, we don't have consistent seasons anymore.

Winter no longer last months. It hits for a week, goes away, comes back, goes away, comes back, etc. from October to May.

January comes in April, and April comes at the end of December. No wonder I'm confused. 

It was too wintry in November to get my autumn
raking done, but it was pleasantly warm at the end
of December, today, so I finally worked on it.  

I enjoyed the break from winter the past couple of days. Winter is my least favorite season.

But with the weather patterns lately, I just don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.

Should I be weeding and harvesting the garden on December 27, when normally at this time of year I'd be heading off into the mountains, with a couple feet of snow underfoot, to spend the day snowshoeing?

I guess I'll garden today, and postpone my snowshoeing expeditions to Memorial Day, when we'll probably get tons of snow. 

NOT The Way To Do Autumn Clean Up

The claim is, it's more efficient to pluck autumn
leaves off trees one by one, rather than raking them up later.  

I'll admit it's a fair amount of work getting your yard in order in the autumn.

You need to rake up the leaves, empty the planters, cut back the frost-bitten perennials, mulch the cold-sensitive plants and put the gardens to bed. It's quite a task.

That said, I don't think the House of Commons in London quite has the knack for efficient autumn clean-up, to put it mildly.

According to the Guardian, a gardener was ordered to remove yellow leaves, one by one, from a circle of lime trees on the Commons rather than raking them up once they fall. 

The logic is pretty, um creative.

Parliamentary authorities claim asking the gardener to remove leaves manually from the trees is have defended their decision to ask a gardener to remove each leaf manually from trees because it's more efficient than raking them up.

Huh?

It must take forever to remove leaves from trees one by one. Raking can be done in even a large yard in one afternoon. And don't landscaping companies in England have leaf blowers? Judging from the size of the yard where they're picking leaves off the trees, it looks like a two or three hour job to remove leaves once they've fallen off the trees.

I also noticed that despite the gardener's efforts, a number of leaves had already fallen onto the grounds. Somebody's going to rake them up anyway.

But a Commons spokesman doubled down, says the Guardian:

"If we waited for the leaves to fall off it would waste a lot of time raking them up. It is more time efficient."

"It is not possible to separate the cost of removing leaves from the trees in New Palace Yard from the wider cost of the gardening contract. The leaves are removed each winter as a more time-efficient alternative to raking fallen leaves."

Um, wouldn't raking leaves just be part of one big gardening contract? Most landscapers and gardeners I know either charge by the hour, or sign a contract for one season to do all the necessary yard work, including raking leaves.

An alternative explanation makes a little more sense

Here's a report from the BBC:

"Gardener Annabel Honeybun told The Daily Telegraph that the procedure was necessary. 

'I am not picking leaves off the trees,' she said. 'I am cutting them individually down to the second bud so they keep their shape.'

'I wouldn't pick leaves off. These lime trees are so old and they have not been 'pleached' for years, so we have to keep their shape.' " 

Pleached? I have never heard that gardening term before, at least in terms of leaves. And I am a gardener, though I admit I'm not the world's leading gardening expert.

I know pleaching refers to interweaving branches and vines for a hedge or arbor. 

Although all the media in Britain have covered this story, it almost seems like a hoax to me. I love the name of the gardener: Annabel Honeybun.

And I can't believe anyone would be so stupid as to remove leaves by hand.

But then, humans have always found creative new ways to be truly bizarre, so there you go.

Is The DEA A Little Too Interested In Your Spring Gardening?

Apparently, we need to use a little caution when going to garden centers this spring, especially if those garden centers sell hydroponic equipment.

OK gardeners, you're busted. Don't tell
the DEA you're just starting tomatoes indoors
They know it's drugs!  

In some areas of the Midwest, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration is staking out garden centers that sell hydroponic equipment, then conducting raids on households whose occupants were seen buying the stuff, says the Huffington Post, Patch, and other media outlets. 

Of course, a number of people who buy hydroponic equipment indeed use it to help grow pot. One of the people who were staked out indeed had some.

Angela Kirking, 46, was arrested in a raid on her place three weeks after she bought a bottle of organic fertilizer at one of these garden centers. It turns out she had less than a third of an ounce of pot at her place.

Yeah, possessing a third of an ounce of pot is illegal in Illinois, but staking out a garden center, conducting a three week investigation then having a big SWAT team conduct this huge raid on Kirking's place seems to be a bit of overkill don't you think?

DEA officials were asked that very question about overkill, but they're not answering questions.

It was even worse for the Harte family in suburban Kansas City last spring, according to the Associated Press. Adlyn and Robert Harte, both former CIA employees, thought it would be fun to buy some hydroponic equipment to teach their kids about gardening.

But the DEA surveillance caught the couple buying the hydroponic equipment.  So the DEA, like they seem to like to do, conducted another one of their dramatic SWAT team style raids on the Harte home last spring.

The "illicit" plants they found in the house were: Three tomato plants, one melon plant and two butternut squash plants.

I wonder how much this raid cost taxpayers?  The gall of the Hartes! Growing vegetables under grow lights and hydroponics!

And it could get more expensive. The Hartes are suing, because they said police and drug officials had no basis to carry out the raid. (They seem to have a strong case)

So, gardeners, now that it's spring, don't garden suspiciously! No grow lights to get plants started early indoors! No hydroponics!  Even buying fertilizer is suspect.

The DEA is watching, and they know that tomatoes are a gateway drug. You grow one tomato plant, and soon you'll graduate to a pot farm and a meth lab.

Or something like that. Maybe the DEA wants us all to stick to McDonald's and Twinkies?

More Flower Bounty From My Garden

The summer flower season continues along in my gardens in St. Albans, Vermont as these photos I took show:

Rhododendron Survivor

Two years ago, this rhododendron was just a stick, poking out of a railroad tie that the previous owner of my house in St. Albans, Vermont had placed in front of the house as "landscaping."

For some reason, I didn't just throw the rhododendron stick out. I put it in the corner of the yard, in good dirt, and this was the result. It lives!

One Tough Vermont Flower

Granted, it's not been the harshest late fall/early winter around St. Albans, in northern Vermont, but I'm certainly impressed with the flower that's pictured.

This flower at my house in northwestern Vermont
continues to hang in there as of Dec. 4, despite
early winter weather. 

As of today, December 5, it's endured temperatures that dropped into the upper teens, soil frozen rock solid, thawed, and refrozen, several inches of crushing, slushy snow, strong winds and next to no sun. The flower is in a pot that was part of a beautiful arrangement this summer and early autumn on my deck.

I took the pot off the deck a couple weeks ago, put it near the back door, ready to remove the dead plants and take inside, and I forgot about it. Stoically, our flower kept blooming. And no, it's not freeze-dried like that. It's actually still alive.

I might leave it outside to see how much harsh weather it can survive. But who thought something so delicate looking could be so tough?  Hope I have the strength to match a little flower.