Sitting in the Garden
I visited Green Thumb Nursery in San Marcos today. Green Thumb has suddenly become my go-to local nursery owing to the diversity of products that they offer. My usual favorite nursery is Waterwise Botanicals. They are a very serious nursery that only stocks drought-tolerant plants and a whole array of roses, which are decidedly not doubt-tolerant. In many ways they offer the best quality of a wide variety of plant matter since they grow most of their own plants. They also do some wonderful succulent arrangements that are very creative, but they do not sell novelty items or garden adornments per se. There are even more serious nurseries that Waterwise. Oasis Water Efficient nursery has some of the more exotic and unique cacti and succulents, but they are particularly pricey for their very high quality specimen plants. Waterwise is no cheap nursery, but I consider them far more affordable than Oasis. At the other end of the spectrum is Javier which has good bulk plants that are more common and less special…and quite a bit more economical. Green Thumb sits somewhere in the middle, but has the added advantage of having both a vast array of mulch and soil, competitive with Grangetto’s (where I usually buy my mulch and soil) and then a whole array of novelty items, which, if I am in the mood for such silliness, is a nice distraction.
I am in between projects right now, having finished the Hobbit House and not wanting to start something new and big given our travel and visitor schedule over the next few months. I am moving into maintenance mode for a while, and it feels both leisurely and pleasant. I am using the time to both enjoy the garden and put some little enhancements to it. Green Thumb has an entire area dedicated to fairy village paraphernalia. Yes, I have a fairy village tucked away in a cliff-side dwelling behind the garage, and, yes, it is ostensibly for my granddaughters, but yes, I too get some pleasure out of adding to it whenever I find interesting chotchkas to add to it. I hadn’t perused that area for some time so I was pleased to find that Green Thumb had gotten in a shipment of all sorts of interesting figurines. I added a skunk, a piglet, a squirrel, a few worker gnomes and a secret Hobbit door that I am tucking way into the cliff cleft to add an air of intrigue. And no, I have no idea where I get these ideas from.
I also decided to buy a few supplemental flowering plants to replace a few feature potted plants that have gone sideways on me. Thee spruce ups are easy and quick. And then there was a impromptu decision to revise the neighbor shielding program. Based on a few texts with my neighbor Robert (the marine biologist who is also a gear-head) I made a command decision to replace the metal screens I ordered with a nice tree. It turns out that Green Thumb is not a big tree nursery. Moon Valley Nursery, the Deathstar of nurseries where nothing costs less than a thousand dollars and they insist on planting what they sell to give the sense of value added, seems to own the local tree market. Hell, even Winston caved and bought his Palo Verde at Moon, but he tells me he did get the military discount and paid only $500 for a non-planted 24-inch boxed tree. The Palo Verde I bought from them that ended my desire to shop there any more was….oh yeah, $1,000, but that was planted and involved the removal of two gigantic agave Century Plant stumps the size of small planets.
So, as I wandered around the back lot at Green Thumb looking at their sparse supply of trees, I stumbled on the tree of my short-lived dreams. It was an Indian Laurel Fig, whatever that is. What stood out about it was that rising from its 24-inch box was a white trunk the size of an elephant trunk that was topped by a near-perfect ball of very full leaves. It is a beautiful tree and then I looked at the price tag. It said $239.99, which made me wonder if the Indian Laurel Fig tree is really just an overgrown weed or something equally common. I then tried to push on the tree and found that it was very heavy and sturdy. That made me seek out Hassie, the nursery manager who was the only one of the one hundred or so employees at Green Thumb empowered to discuss trees. She cut to the chase and said she was so busy bitch springtime deliveries and plantings that if I wanted a deal she would let me cash and carry the stupid fig tree for $150. Needless to say, I lifted the offer on the spot and then started wondering how to get the damn thing home.
Enter Handy Brad and his handy truck. I called him and he gave me his usual Eeyore grumble about just having cleaned his truck for date night. Nevertheless, he was in San Marcos and came to the nursery to help me get it home. Once at home, it took Handy Brad, Neighbor Robert, Neighbor Robert’s teenage son Luke and me to carry the 250 pound beast the fifty feet to the designated screening spot just below Robert’s parking area, where his truck grille was sticking in my face. Since Joventino is not due back here for three weeks and I was worried about leaving my big tree investment in its box that long, I decided to You-Tube boxed tree planting. It was very helpful and filled me with the confidence I needed to think I could handle this on my own in the morning. This morning, I got out the pick and shovel as well as the hammer and tin snips (thank you You-Tube) and got to work digging the hole. You-Tube gave me an invaluable tip about flooding the site of the planting the night before to make the ground easier to dig. It worked like a charm and I had the hole dug in no time. I then followed the You-Tube instructions on sequencing the box removal and placing the tree ball in the hole. I wrestled the 250-pounder into the hole myself and voila!. I had planted, moated and mulched that big old fig tree in about an hour, which is what You-Tube told me it would take. I was VERY proud of myself and proceeded to send pictures to anyone who I thought would be impressed by my undertaking. And the best part was that the tree looked really good in that spot and did a perfect job of screening the offending truck grille from my view….all for $150 and some sweat.
Now I have these two metal screens and related paraphernalia arriving in the mail in the next few days to decide where to place. I’m already plotting out my next mini-project because God-forbid I would ever think to return something I don’t really need any more. Instead, I will expand my back hillside in one place or another that can benefit from an attractive free-standing metal screen with hanging plants all over it. That all caused me to spend most of the rest of my day watering the garden from one side to the next. That gave me the ability to sit on a number of the benches and natural rock seats I have discovered and contemplate my garden, which is full spring bloom at the moment. I could sit and look at my garden hillside all day. In fact, that is pretty much what I did all day, and may do again tomorrow.