Sunday, February 05, 2006

A day in the garden

The sun was out, and I spent the day in the garden. Removed quite a bit of worn-out foliage from the front beds so the crocuses and short red tulips that are sending up shoots will have room to bloom. Moved the long pearwood poles and camellia poles (leftovers from the professional pruning last week) to the back yard where they'll stay while I figure out what to do with them. The camellia wood is heavy!

Finally, I brought out my extension lopper and pruned the Candice grapevine back to three long leaders. This took a bit longer than it should have because Kaylee climbed into the arbor and was swatting at the lopper. I had to decoy her to the other side of the arbor, then rush back and clip branches before she made it back into the danger zone.

I kept seeing more and more projects in the garden, but by then it was getting darker and cooler and it was time to go inside and take my Vitamin I for gardening (Ibuprofen).

Friday night's windstorm had an odd and unpleasant side-effect I hate to think about. We found pieces of roof shingles the size of small pizzas all over the back porch and patio. It turned out they'd come from the house behind us. The house has a "two-layer" roof, and the top layer had become very dry and damaged, so much of it flew off in the storm. We saw the neighbors picking up asphalt shingles all over the neighborhood, and they came into our yard to pick up the pieces there as well.

The unpleasant part wasn't the shingles in the yard. It was the scratches the gravel-coated shingles made when they slammed into our nice (well, formerly nice) new glass kitchen door.

It's not like there are a lot of scratches, but, on the other hand, there are enough that you'd probably want to replace the door if you were going to sell the house. I haven't decided quite what to say to the neighbors yet; if they were too cheap to replace an ancient roof that was falling apart, I don't think they'll be happy to replace a $1,000 commercial-grade glass door.

My plan is to call the window company and see if there is some reasonably priced way to repair the scratches. Then I want to let the neighbors know that they need to do something about their roof before it attacks our door again.

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