No, what I've got is life from a much bigger (and subsequently more expensive) experiment that we started last fall.
TREES!!
Yay for tree buds! Not only does it confirm that Spring is finally here, but that Darrell and I managed to not kill our trees! Or at least not one of them--this is our Blazing Red Maple (or something like that) in our backyard; the other two in the front yard (some sort of a Linden and a Yellowwood) have not shown as much success in the budding department. Although truthfully, the Maple is definitely my favorite (is that weird?) so I'm super glad that if only one of them lives, it's that one. I'm totally indifferent about replacing the other two.
You might be thinking that having a tree bud after winter isn't that big of a deal. Or you may be thinking that it's really strange that I'm already okay with replacing trees that we just planted last fall. But see, much like many of our "projects", the whole planting-a-tree bit was very much a "let's just do it and see how it turns out" kind of thing. Here's how the process went:
Me: We need to get at least one tree planted before winter hits.
Darrell: Okay.
(two weeks later)
Me: We really need to get going on the trees. It's already the middle of October.
Darrell: Okay. Let's go now.
Me: Now? Um, well, do we know what we want? Where are we going to plant the trees? Should we plant trees like the ones our neighbors have? Do we know what kind of trees our neighbors have?
Darrell: Don't know. Let's just go see what they have.
(at Landscape Garden Centers)
Darrell: Look, they're having a buy two get one free sale. Let's get three trees.
Me: Um, okay.
(cue thirty minutes of aimlessly wandering around and looking at tree labels--thank goodness they put pictures on there of what the tree will look like once it's matured!)
Me: So which ones are you thinking?
Darrell: Not sure. Any that you like?
Me: I want one that has pretty colors in the fall (hence my love for our maple). And nothing that's too pointy.
Darrell: Okay, so that sounds like it would be these (shows me the Linden, Yellowwood, and Maple).
Me: Yeah, those look fine.
Darrell: Sounds good. We'll borrow a truck tomorrow and come back and pick them up.
Me: Come again?
Darrell: Well I'm not going to pay them to drive our trees the five miles to our house. And I'm certainly not going to pay someone to dig a hole in our yard. I can do that myself.
Me: Um, okay.
And that was how we got our trees. Maybe not exactly (we may have consulted with one of the worker guys a time or two), but that pretty well sums up the thought and effort that went into it. I'll spare you the annoyingness of more dialogue and just explain what happened once we got the trees home (which, for the record, was its own adventure--imagine Darrell in the bed of a truck trying to keep three trees upright and me trying to drive as slowly as possible down a two-lane highway).
Since we never really "planned" where to put the trees, we moved the (massively heavy) pots around our yard until we found a spot for each of them that looked good. But we decided that before we just up and planted them that we should probably call that 811 number so that Darrell didn't kill himself digging the holes. Well, turns out we had planned to put one of the trees on top of some pipes or wires or something. They told us that the lines were deep enough that we could still dig if we wanted to, but cautioned us that should they ever need to get at those lines that they'd have to uproot our tree. No thank you. So that caused another entertaining afternoon of us hauling around three potted trees and trying to find a good, aesthetically pleasing (and safe!) spot to put them all. Once that was settled it was finally time to dig. After we went to the hardware store and bought a shovel of course. Thankfully the trees had some explanations on them for how to transfer them into the ground, and we certainly tried our best to follow those. But we have super clay-y soil, which not only made it hard to make the holes deep enough, but also had me super concerned about the abilities of the trees to live. Plus we had to be worried about the ridiculous winds in South Dakota, so off we went on another trip to the hardware store to buy some rope and stakes to help our trees remain upright in the wind. Those little guys had so many things working against them, and to top it off we were terrible at remembering to water them.
So you can see why I'm super excited to see that at least one tree has persevered. And even though we may not be in the house enough years to see the maple mature and produce it's brilliantly red fall leaves, I can be happy in knowing that we left a good legacy for the next owners (although apparently not so much with the yellowwood. I did some reading up on them after we had the trees purchased and it turns out that they tend to attract bees. Whoops).
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