Meh...

Mondays are tough. Up with the alarm. Wearing shoes and socks. Missing my dogs. All these people around. It's a shock. I know I'm lucky to have a job that (almost) pays the bills – I'm just saying it's a shock.

So I went to the Lawyer's Nursery traveling tree sale Saturday, and bought Jonaprince and Northern Greening apple trees, and three shrubs. They are bare-root trees, and about six feet tall. Seemed like a great deal for $12. I hemmed and hawed and almost didn't go, thinking I could save money by ordering some root stock and grafting scions from our two apples at the Ancestral Home. I think apple root stock runs about $3 per tree. But I want fruit ASAP, and we're not getting any younger. So I'll get some root stock, too, and cover all bets. How could I have too many apples? There's cider and pies, and the animals would eat them, too.

I'm worried about gophers eating the roots and killing the trees, so I made cages out of half-inch hardware cloth for the roots. Damn nuisance. But the baskets should protect the roots until the trees are big enough to withstand some gopher pruning. And once the trees are that big (a couple of years) I'll worry about the charmingly named apple maggot. Not a problem if you use pesticides, but we don't, so it'll be a challenge.

Got the trees in the ground. C. planted four pounds of spuds that were lost but turned up after a month or so.

Em came up, as did KC and his friend Cullen. The boys worked on the truck, and helped me dismantle the hoop house over the spuds. Cullen rolled a very large rock into place in a garden terrace. C. and I dug it out of the ground (leverage is a wonderful thing) but it was great to have muscle to move it into line. KC is going to auto-mechanic school in the fall, and I am just going to let him have his way with the truck. It's not running now, and it's not the end of the world if never runs again. (breathe) He knows something about cars – not as much as he thinks, though. Yeah, it makes me nervous, but it's probably important to trust him to fix it.