My $0.89 Obliterate the Oak Tree Experiment

As I mentioned in my last article, we have this oak tree growing up through our peach tree. I read online that if you put copper nails into it, it will kill the roots. I don't know how or why that's supposed to work, but I decided to give it a swing. We went down to the hardware store, and after looking around for a while, we finally came up with these copper tacks for 89 cents:

Here's the lovely oak tree we're trying to be rid of:

You can tell that it was dark when I trimmed it last time. I left a lot of stuff alive. I started pressing the nails into each branch after I trimmed off the stuff I left:

Most went right in without problems. Others I had to use a hammer to get them to go in clear:

This is what the tips of each branch looked like:

Pretty classy, if you ask me. :) I like copper. The largest ones got two:

I just kept adding...

...until they all got one:

Good thing I had some company during this monotonous task:

I also got to brush a little red spider off my face when I was done. I tried to take his picture, but he ran off too fast. :( Better luck next time. :)

Eradicating an Oak Tree from the Peach Tree

One of our peach trees has been infested by an oak tree!

The only thing we know to do about it is to chop out all the new growth.

I actually quite like the leaves on the oak tree, but I think I like the fruit on the peach tree better. :D

You can see in this picture that the oak tree is growing mostly off to one side of the peach tree, but it actually has some shoots coming right up through the middle of the peach tree's trunk:

Canicus (Pronounced Con-EE-cuss - It's Spanish for Marbles) and Midnight, my kittens, had to come see what I was doing. They wanted to hide behind this box though:


Look at this big pile of oak branches I clipped off:

I wish I thought that was the end of that, but somehow I'm afraid the saga will continue as it has for the past few years. Any suggestions for a total annihilation of this tree would be greatly appreciated.

Weeding the Corner Garden

The corner garden; haven of peace, refuge of safety, and retreat of calm, sublime, serenity...if you're a weed. I have a huge problem with grass in this bed. Here's a picture of before I got started weeding:

You can see that there are by far more weeds than there are flowers. Good thing I think weeding is recreation after a day in the office, right? There really are some flowers there among the thistles:

I don't weed without gardening gloves. Maybe I've got just a little too much feminine in me so I don't like to get my hands dirty, or maybe I'm just too lazy to spend the next 10 days digging mud out of my fingernails. I don't know. Maybe it's really because I'm afraid someone's going to send me a message on my BlackBerry and I don't want to get dirt in it, just rip off the gloves and text away. :) Anyhow, so I got out my trusty butterfly glove (by the way, by the time I was done weeding this garden I had to throw that pair of glove away because they got a hole in them) and my metal hand shovel and set to work:

I got that shovel from the gardening club free as a test product or something. It was advertised as a transplant shovel. I got a hard plastic Fisker shovel from them too, but I like this metal one better since it's a lot sharper because the metal's thinner. It took me several days to weed this lovely garden, but I enjoyed every minute of it. How can you not when you find such pleasent surprises as this Violet Candy Tuft Plant that I didn't realize had actually come up:

Or these beautiful candy cane petunias:

Or lovely purple and pink petunias:

Look at this mammoth pile of weeds I got every night:

I'm not sure what the pink flowers (I like to call them fireworks) are here, but the white ones are baby's breath, if I'm not mistaken:

These blue petunias sure are lovely, wouldn't you agree?

I simply can't stop cooing over how lovely the sunset was this night:

Is that one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen, or what? I just love it. I think it has a very good chance of being my next crayon art subject. Another day, just before sunset, the clouds were so gorgeous:

And when sunset came....you can form your own opinion on this one:

That same day it sprinkled a little while I was out there, and a piece of a rainbow showed up:

Here's another sunset picture from that night:

The weather that day was especially meaningful to me for personal reasons. I really enjoyed my weeding! I think it took around a week to finish, probably a little less, but here are the end results:

Yes, those are a few more weeds there around the power pole. Don't worry, they're gone now. I went ahead and snapped a picture after all the weeds were gone, just for good measure. ;)

All the flowers and the tomatoes in this garden were grown from seed by me. Those are cherry tomatoes on the end away from the street. I think the sunflowers peeking over the fence from the neighbors sure add to the effect...especially next year when I'm weeding them out of the garden again... :)