Planted a Garden

Recently, I planted my garden! Or replanted I suppose I should say.

The story started about two months back when I went through the labor intensive task of clearing out the entire garden, pulling out dead bushes, piles of weeds, and digging up a series of roots that had taken over the entire underground of the garden. This task was made more difficult by the fact that the dogs wanted to help me with this process, running in and out of the dirt and making a mess of everything that I had already removed from the ground. So when all was said and done, I was quite proud of what I accomplished and soon went to the North Hills to some orchards to buy an array of very pretty, and somewhat expensive flowers.

A week later my flowers were dead. I had no idea why, I watered them, kept the dogs off of them, but they still died despite my efforts. Weeks later I realized why. As Dan and I were driving through Wexford, I noticed several houses in which all of the flowers were wilted, dying, or dead. All of these houses were within a mile of Soergels, so what my assumption is is that Soergels loads their plants and flowers with steroids, leaving them no possible way to survive once they are out of the plant steroid miracle grow infested atmosphere and are planted in real soil. That is assuming those other people had also bought their plants from Soergels, which I am.

Which leads us to the day of replanting. Ever since my plants died I have been yearning to go to the Home Depot to purchase new flowers, though I was conflicted. You see, I do not approve of people who go out and spend hundreds of dollars in the spring on flowers and mulch who then repeat this every year because these flowers die at the end of the season. This is an absurd waste of money in my opinion. I had already spent over fifty dollars on flowers and the only way I was justifying buying more was because of the fact that I had won three ten dollar gift cards from work, so essentially these flowers were free, so that was fine. Also, because we were recently gifted a grill and patio set, we were spending more and more time outside and I was tired of looking at the pathetic excuse of a garden that was dying more and more each day.

So I started replanting the garden. We stopped at Home Depot on the way home from Wexford one day and I got flowers and potting soil and top soil and some miracle grow plant food. I was taking no chances in having these flowers die as well. Upon arriving home I donned my gardening gloves and got to work. I decided to clear out some of the lillies that had overtaken the other half of the garden and that the dogs had trampled to a pulp. So I started to dig. Dan watched for a few minutes before he got bored and decided to go upstairs to hook up the television to our awesome and free cable. Within minutes of his departure my shovel hit something hard in the ground. Figuring it was just a rock I moved my shovel back a few inches and dug back in. Upon bringing the shovel back out it caught on the buried object and lifted it out of the ground. Seeing that it was not a rock I got excited. Jackpot! I had stumbled upon buried treasure and since Dan was out of sight it was all mine! I slowly opened the tin and peeked inside... and screamed and dropped it on the ground. "Dan! Dan! Get down here!" Clomp clomp clomp comes Dan down the stairs and out the back door. "What's wrong?" "Just get rid of that tin!" What was in the tin you ask?

I may have discovered that our flowers were not dying because Soergels kept them hopped up on flower steroids, but because our garden was cursed by the vengeful spirit of a dead pet hampster/gerbil/rat/flying squirrel. The flowers are doing much better now, though it is still unconfirmed if it was in fact Soergels' fault, or that of the dead animal.


It's not too impressive, but you should have seen it before. Of course, the grass also used to be green, but with the amount of urine spread on it every day by the dogs it hasn't stood a chance.

First Post = First Post About Poop

One of the many reasons for buying a house was to finally have a yard where the dogs could run and play and, most importantly, do their business without us needing to put on pants and go with them. And the new house serves these purposes well, although the dogs have developed a habit of barking at any noise that strikes their sensitive ears, as well as any stray figure that happens to enter their fields of vision. We do our best to be good neighbors, though, cleaning up after them and trying to keep them quiet, pulling them inside when they start to bark.

Tara left yesterday after work to spend the weekend with her parents, so last night I was alone, staying up late, playing video games, and listening to all the music that she dislikes. I slept in this morning, and when I finally took the dogs out, I was greeted in the yard by a series of four or five small piles of what turned out to be kitty litter, each serving as a sort of burial mound for a pile of poop. I quickly ran through a mental list of suspects, and quickly ruled out everyone but our neighbors. I tried to think of a proper response to this action. I didn't want to just go and clean it right up. I thought about grabbing Tara's guns and cleaning them on the patio table, but we don't have any cleaner and I don't have any idea how to clean a gun. I thought about standing next to their house and yelling "Cowards!"*. In the end, I just sat in my chair waiting for them to come out. Quickly, my neighbor came over and semi-apologized, saying he had thought we were out of town and that the smell was too much. I politely acknowledged his reasons, reminding him that we clean it up daily, but that it accumulates at a disturbing rate (seriously, these dogs each dump a good pile about 3 times a day). After that he left. I waited a bit, then cleaned it up.

It was after all of this, as I looked at my yard with the now-flattened piles of kitty litter, that I realized how aggressive my neighbor's actions were. I wasn't lying when I said we clean it up daily, so this was really just a day's worth of poop. If that is bothering him, then it seems like our yard must bother him constantly, which serves to explain why he thought it was necessary for such an action. But while he thought we were out of town, he still chose to pour litter on the piles rather than just clean them up. Now, even after picking up all of the poop, I'm left with kitty litter in my yard. If we were really out of town, that would mean the number of piles wouldn't be increasing, so why not just pick it all up and be down with it? That would have made me feel guilty, whereas now I just think it was kind of a dick move because I'm stuck trying to figure out a way of separating litter from grass, or having to deal with having a spotted lawn. I have half a mind to go over and say "I cleaned up the poop, you guys can come over whenever to get your kitty litter back."





*But getting the proper effect would involve rigging a hose simulate a torrential downpour, and all that preparation would go against the spontaneous nature I was aiming for.