Lenten thanks, Day 10
Thanks, God, for leading the late, great tax lawyer to shuck me off her rolls and for moving a tax accountant into Dave’s (former) Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. She and her husband not only are splendid neighbors, she saved me a ton of money on this year’s taxes and charged a fraction of what the lawyer’s been billing.
If this doesn’t warm the cockles of Frugal Scholar‘s heart, nothing will.
So I’ve been building a berm around the north side of the biggest orange tree, where the grade slopes enough to draw the irrigation water away from the tree and direct it under the gate and out into the alley. This has been a longstanding annoyance, but I’ve been too lazy to do much about it.
Having dug a couple of deep holes for a pair of new roses, I finally had some nice, clayey, sticky dirt with which to form a low semicircle that I hope will trap the water…without my having to find enough dirt to build an entire circle. That’s the plan. To shore up this mound, I want to cobble its surface with river rock. I do not wish to purchase the river rock.
Luckily, the alleys around here are full of loose rock, quite a lot of it just what I have in mind. So I spent half a morning walking up and down the alleys scavenging stones. As I’m skulking around, what should I find but a big framed giclée print, brand-new, still in its Costco cardboard protectors, just sitting there next to the garbage can.
Why is it in the alley?
Its glass is cracked.
Somebody paid $29.99 for this thing, marked down from $39.99. Think of that.
First, it means one of my neighbors can afford to throw $29.99 directly into the trash. Second, it means they don’t have enough sense or craftsiness to schlep to the nearest glass shop, ask them to cut a piece big enough to replace the broken pane, deconstruct the cheapie frame, and fix it themselves.
Granted, Aaron Brothers or Michael’s will charge more to replace the glass than the junk print is worth. But a glass shop will charge just a few dollars. And taking a picture frame apart is just not very difficult.
The thing is an awful cliché, of course. But I couldn’t leave it to die in the alley. My plan is to replace the glass and then hang it on the back patio, well in under the overhang where it can’t get wet. In time it’ll fade, of course. But for the nonce…hey! Free décor!
Moving on, the rock quarrying endeavor is slowly yielding a nice variety of stones and rip-rap. I found some thick broken slices of unpolished milled granite (??? what do you do with that?), a few pieces of flagstone, and many, many desert stones and river rocks. Here’s the nascent project; it’s much further along now than it was here. I expect another two or three alley expeditions will retrieve enough rocks to cover the entire semicircle.
I hope this works. Sometimes my berming schemes succeed, sometimes not. An awful lot of water pours out of that tree’s bubbler. This mound may not be tall enough to contain it, or it may flow downhill toward the gate fast enough to wash the dirt away, stone paving or no stone paving.
We shall see.
We grow citrus commercially in the central california desert. Sounds to me maybe you need to get a more restrictive bubbler & water more slowly.
Hm. I could shut the bubbler off and deep-water with the sprinkler. That actually might be better for the tree. But it would require me to remember to haul the sprinkler over there once a week (more often in the summer??).
Both oranges are looking much better just now. They’re responding to the warmer weather and recent fertilizing with bursts of new foliage and vast numbers of buds. If we manage to avoid the extreme weather this year, I think they’ll recover from last fall’s battering.
Nice contour on grade. Very permaculture-y.
This has drawn me out of my burrow. Good work! And you can always donate it if you don’t like it.
I should have added that the DH realized late in the season last year that he’s been overwatering our citrus trees by a lot. He’d been on a once-a-week schedule since day 1, and in August (about 7 years later) when he did some detailed checking of soil water levels realized they were too wet (which decreases production). He switched to about every 10 days instead (remember, this is August in the CA desert/zone 9 heat & dryness), with one or two zones even less frequently because of the clay in the soil. Your county Ag Extension people (or master gardener, if AZ has that program) might be able to help you figure out whether your once a week schedule could be decreased some.