Gardening

Although summer seems to have finally arrived (highs have been near 30 C all week!), I felt like some exercise yesterday. So I donned my gardening duds, filled a water bottle, and headed out to garden until the heat stroke set in. However, I straggled out of bed late enough that I was in the shade all day, and the caretaker kindly refilled my water bottle for me once, and so I didn't quit until I finished digging the last of the sod I wanted removed on the left hand side.

Before:


After:


The caretaker helped some too. (In the second shot, I think he's saying "I'm leaving that bucket for you to carry.")

We put some of the nicer chunks of sod in the nearly-grass-free boulevard:

Even if they don't take, we were just replacing weeds anyway. (I should have watered them, but by the end, I was pooped. There's rain in the forecast for tomorrow.)

People (crazy lady, J, caretaker, E) kept interrupting my gardening efforts to talk to me. (Not that I don't like talking to the neighbours, but I was hoping to get things done faster.) After talking to the caretaker for a bit, I asked him if he'd mind if I worked while we chatted. He was fine with that, so that minimized his interruption. He even helped dig a bit, did much of the sod transplanting, and handed me things as I needed them. :)

I worked through part of my chit-chat with crazy lady too. She sat on the steps and smoked. There wasn't too much of a breeze, but what there was came, unfortunately, from the wrong direction. I didn't want to offend crazy lady by asking her to sit somewhere else, so I just put up with it.

For some reason, several people asked me why I'm gardening. I enjoy gardening (in a love-hate kind of way). I like living in a nice looking place. I like doing things for others. It's supposedly good exercise. Not everything work-like has to be for money. It's one of those things where, if you have to ask, you probably won't understand the answer. Especially since it's complex. For example, I hate being hot, sweaty and dirty... yet I perversely enjoy digging up sod, and turning compost and peat into the clay soil to improve it. Frankly, I'm not 100% sure *I* understand it.

Crazy lady has been doing some more gardening too:

Looks like she's been inspired by my sod removal. She doesn't have the advantage of the right tools, though. (I'm not sure *how* she accomplished what she did... perhaps her sister loaned her some tools?) If she's done it reasonably, it'll reduce the amount of work I need to do on that side. She put all of the removed sod in *one* garbage can, though... I'm a bit worried that the trash people will refuse to take it. I suppose it's not my job to fix the problem should they not... I wasn't the one who put it there, and I'm not the caretaker. When the caretaker asked who had done the digging on the other side, I let him know it was crazy lady... and he knows that I've been putting my sod in the small buckets for my dad to use as fill.

My chit-chat with crazy lady *did* solve one mystery, though... the plants she's been acquiring haven't been "liberated" (as I feared), her sister has been dividing them from her garden.