Jesus is the Mister

It has been a year since I first had a consult with a landscape designer, and decided I wasn’t willing to pay good money for a stranger to make Me a mere *paper plan* for my 400 square foot back yard.  I measured and drew and researched and consulted and hired a friend who predictably bailed, then drew some more and thought a whole lot and you know what?  A year later, I have concluded that while I’m capable of solving one side of this 800 square foot front yard/backyard Rubik’s cube,  solving the whole thing is just beyond Me.  There’s too many constraints in my tiny 15.5’ wide lot, too many trees and utilities and setbacks and codes and tradeoffs…  It doesn’t make sense to spend any money doing anything until I have an expert Integrated Master Front Yard and Back Yard Plan to work to.  If I don't flip for the plan, I'm going make an expensive mistake. May as well pay it now and spare Myself the pain. I'll be happier in the end.  Part of being a Master is knowing when You don't know what the fuck You're doing, and being willing to ask for help.

Back to the landscape designer, let’s call him Dave.

Dave is not to My knowledge into kink.  He’ll probably get an idea though if he goes upstairs to use the loo at some point. Part of Dave’s marketing pitch is that - if you want him to - he will design a yard that’s as quirky as you are.

Yeah.

 If kinky is anything like quirky,  I’m pretty quirky.  We should get along great.

So Dave wrote me a proposal for design services. I signed it which makes it a CONTRACT (*yikes*). And then I paid the 40% deposit. Dave hooked Me up with an arborist he often works with, and Adam the sky diving arborist who also does treehouses was out here in under a week.  This is already huge progress because I worked My way through Angies’ List last fall and could *not* get a single arborist to so much as return My calls and emails.  So a la Emeril… *BOOM*!!  We have answers to all the hard questions about the trees, and he didn’t even charge Me a consult fee, cuz of course I’m hiring Adam The Wonder Arborist to do what’s needed.  And frankly, it’s way cheaper than I was braced for.

Front Yard Cherry Tree:   Bad case of fire blight and a parallel case of gumosis (process of making gum, probably not as inconsequential as it sounds given that the tree appears to be exsanguinating.  Now I get the whole amber thing.).  Nothing to be done except wait and see if the tree can hang onto the few green leaves it has left until October.  If it holds tough (“it’s basically starving”), it should survive the winter, and we treat it in spring when it buds.  But OBTW, it will probably get a blight every time we have a wet spring, so with global warming and being near a flood plain and all, you’ll probably end up treating it most years.  In My mind, the cherry is a very nice Nice-To-Have.  But I might cut it down anyway, cuz I ain’t got the budget to baby two trees constantly. Keep reading, gardeners.

Front Yard Juniper:  ROCK STAR!  Scary and possibly fatal looking split in trunk has petrified and is healing over correctly. Good strong tree, no worries, just needs some trimming to stop it rubbing on the house.

Backyard Ash Tree:    OK, yes, sure, when you’re upstairs in the bedroom you can see a few brown leaves here and there and that’s some other unpronounceable kind of blight/ fungus action going on because of the wet spring.  But it’s not serious, at least not this year. Make sure to get rid of all the dead leaves in fall, instead of being all “oooo-free-mulch” like last year.  But oh, honey… you do indeed have Emerald Ash Borer.  There was about zero chance you wouldn’t have Emerald Ash Borer in your tree, since it’s epidemic right now and has killed about every ash tree in the adjoining county.  Note the patches of blonding on the bark on the undersides of the branches. Spread like wildfire it did.  But you’re lucky.  There’s not a ton of ashes around you, and it’s early on in the infestation process.  The tree can be saved, no question.  And since it’s only 14” in diameter, it’s not even stupid expensive, doesn’t need to be tented or anything.  But yes, you’ll be doing this every year.  Good news, however, is you will continue to have a lovely ash tree that hides the 15 or 20 ugly power lines, cable lines, phone lines, and other liney-lines that run all over the back yard and the alley.  You will continue to have a wonderful, serene, tree house like green canopy view out of your upstairs windows most of the year.  And brown vertical branches masking all those horizontal lines the rest of the time, which make it really pretty when it snows.

All in all, not bad.  Thank you, Adam the Wonder Arborist, who BTW, is really hot and I would totally let him climb into My canopy.  Just saying.

So tomorrow, Dave comes for the big visit in which he will Measure Everything and Describe Site Conditions, and so on.  It’s very exciting, this beginning of the Integrated Master Front Yard/Back Yard Plan, not terrifying at all. 

Ok, just a *little* terrifying, I mean,  it’s gonna be thousands, obviously.  I just don’t know how many thousands (bigger than a breadbox?) to actually implement whatever he comes up with, and we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about how I’m not made of money and we need to prioritize and work in phases and again, not made of money (did I mention that before?).  It’s just mind blowing how fast a home owner can spend five thousand dollars… furnaces, roofs, floods, lightning strikes… But really, I knew this needed to be done when I bought the place, it was factored into the purchase price and factored into the reno budget, back before I understood the reno budget was wildly optimistic despite My attempts to be extremely not-optimistic.  It’s not like it wasn’t TOTALLY OBVIOUS that the landscaping was well, there wasn’t anything like, decorative. And there was a lot of ugly, starting with the crooked, rusted chain link fencing, which the neighbor's flipper has since painted a nice shiny silver, but only on their side, with random silver drips and bleed through onto My side.  The yards simply weren't level in any direction, by a lot.  Pretty much the yards just fall off into the street or alley. Plus it also falls off sideways in the front.  And it back it’s more like a giant swale down the middle before tumbling into the alley.  And it also manages to slope toward the foundation everywhere, that’s very bad, I think we all can agree.  So it must be done. Fundamental, even remedial, improvements must be made and must not wait any longer.  I'm OK with that.  I've had a nice breather from projects, and had a little time to refill the renovation coffers, there's nothing to be gained by waiting any longer.

And hey, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to really go whole hog in the plan so I could, like, sit outside and not be eaten alive by the zika and west nile virus transmitting invisible asian tiger mosquitoes?  That’s a goal worth pursuing.

And yeah, that cherry tree.  I think it’s coming down.  Forget that it needs to be massaged and pampered like a Kobe beef.  It’s a reservoir of fungus and blight.  And I’m a vegetable gardener, who  immediately spotted after Adam The Wonder Arborist left, that My tomato plant under the cherry tree has the worst case of tomato blight.  And the tomato on the edge of the cherry canopy has a moderate case of tomato blight.  And the tomato upwind of the cherry and not under the canopy has zero tomato blight.  This *could* be a co-inky-dink, but I don’t think so.  And if it’s the tomatoes vs the ornamental cherries, the cherry gets it.

In the meanwhile, I will be out there with a spritzer bottle of neem oil, spritzing and misting My tomatoes, and promptly removing the affected leaves, much more religiously now that I understand they are under fungal paratrooper assault from above.  Spritzing and misting the naturally occurring turpentinoid compound in the neem oil to interfere with the fungal damage.

Often as I come and go around the neighborhood, I see a the white church van of a local, Spanish speaking evangelical church.  In giant letters, the van drives around proclaiming: 

JESUS EST EL SENOR!  

I speak enough Spanish and have enough religious education to correctly translate it as “Jesus is Lord”, and I find it interesting to notice that Senor apparently means “Lord” as in Lords and Ladies, which sounds very medieval to My ears.

But the part of My brain that doesn’t speak Spanish as a first language reads the van and hears:  “Jesus is the Mister”.  And it cracks Me up every time.  You’d think it would have stopped being funny after several years, but no, every time.  So I stand in My garden, misting the cherry-fungus-bombarded tomatoes with the Indian neem oil antifungicidal product and think, yeah, Jesus is the Mister.