Well, It Ain't the Garden of Eden

We returned home from vacation last week to a big gardening mess. The weeds that had been ankle-high before we left town now reached above my head, and the tree that had sported a single dead branch had died half-way down. The tree concerned me first, and I did some research to discover that a fungus called fire blight had attacked the apple tree. Unfortunately, the cure-less disease spreads by wind, water, insects, birds, or pretty much anything else that you can find outside, so our other trees were also infected. It didn't help that a huge swarm of Japanese beetles had moved in and made lace of the tops of each tree. Panicked, I called an arborist who came over and, upon seeing our dead tree and its contamination of the others, quickly pronounced our case hopeless and left. On the way out, he told me to get outside that day and kill the beetles. Real helpful guy. So, this weekend, JD rented a chainsaw and hacked down the fire blighted tree, and we spent the rest of the day on ladders cutting off dead branches in our other trees. We won't know until next year whether they'll survive or not. Sunday, we headed back outside to spray Seven for the beetles and to weed whip (or wack) all the weeds in the garden. In this picture, you can see the work JD did on the left getting rid of weeds. On the right, work still to do. We discovered all kinds of vegetables as we weeded!

But don't think that we're hopeless at this gardening stuff. We do have some wonderful things growing in our backyard. Corn, for instance:

We also have blackberries, blueberries, basil, cilantro, parsley, catnip, mint, tomatoes, bananna peppers, cucumbers, watermelon, broccoli, and pumpkins growing. Our bell peppers, green beans, and green onions were lost to a sea of weeds. Ah, well.

We also have some beautiful flowers blooming here and there:

So, as I go back out to continue the assault against nature, I leave you with our biggest weed yet. It took a saw to take this guy down.