Jobs well done

I had two projects for Monday and I got both of them done. Job one was to line up a tiller. You can choose from a tiller with "back tines" or with "front times". With back tines you are looking at needing a two inch tow ball on your truck and with front times you are looking at hefting the tiller onto your truck. The back tiller doesn't care how hard the ground is and does most of the work for you while the front tiller can "bounce" in response to packed earth and requires that you do some of the work. I have reserved a "front tine" tiller for Saturday morning.

 My second job. It turns out that the angry carrots are not actually carrots or angry or evil. It turns out that in reality they are  a harmless form of plant life called rhizomes and they are not bent on world domination. I did not have to lock the basement door because they weren't going to kill me in my sleep.

Good to know. They are very ugly though and I wouldn't want the, cross breeding with the spider crickets that live in the basement so I got the rhizomes safely into the ground as quickly as possible. Its hard to tell how successful that will be because I discovered very soon after I stared Operation Get Those Ugly Carrots In The Ground that the ground available for digging up in the front of the house is not even as nice as the available ground for digging up in the back yard.

I spoke with my garden guru at work and she told me not to plant my rhizomes too deeply because this would kill them. "Too deep" is not a problem in the front yard because there isn't soil to plant anything "too deep". I did not ask her what would happen if they were planted "too shallow" in fact I'm a little afraid that if it were to rain there are  some rhizomes who would not be buried at all. I'm imagining that I'm going to be spending my lunch hour buying some dirt to hide them from the squirrels. My guru also told me not to expect any joy this year from the new plantings. But next year, if even some of my replanted little friends actually bloom next year, I'm going to have a really nice looking front yard. Hopefully...

Because something malignant lives in my front yard and it did something bad to my azalea bush  and whatever it is, it may be hungry. The rhizomes and their iris offspring might not stand a chance. My azalea was a very nice azalia until last year when it failed to develop buds at all. This year I'm not seeing any buds either. What do you call an azalea that does not bloom for two years? A cab.

Some good news? The kitty snipping people finally got back with me and Tiny is going to lose those big brass ones on the 23rd. Whoop!