Friday, July 2, 2010

Trio

This morning I planted three trees. Prunus ukon, since you ask – sounds like a fruit noodle, but is in fact a flowering cherry. Each tree is about 2.5 metres high and will grow a whole lot more.

They arrived “bare-rooted”, which isn’t as exciting as it sounds, and meant they had to go in the ground RIGHT NOW.

Was it easy doing all that planting single-handed, especially the staking with sledgehammer and subsequent stapling of webbing restraints to the stakes? In the rain?

No. No, it wasn’t.

Am I awesome?

Yes. Yes, I am.

The sods have been carefully replaced around the base of each tree. When I started digging them out this morning my wife said in some surprise, “You know what you’re doing!”

“Yes,” I muttered.

Later, our landscape designer friend (another mother from primary school) delivered the trees and saw the sods carefully piled by the planting holes and said in some surprise, “You know what you’re doing!”

“Yes,” I purred.

3 comments:

Keri H said...

Single-handed?
Are you a single-handed (literally speaking) person?

Stephen Stratford said...

No, Keri, luckily I still have two arms and two hands. What I mean is that I did this alone.

And, come to think of it, literally single-handed when it came to the stapling, i.e. one hand holding the tree upright and the other wielding the technology. The gumboots were also engaged.

Keri H said...

That's good: one of my great uncles had only one arm, and invented a number of aids so he could dig the garden, plant trees, gather seaweed in a wheelbarrow etc. and used to make jokes about having to do everything singlehandedly.

Which is why your comment piqued my curiosity...