March 21

Rain all morning, but it's not cold.  We went up the hill with 2 shrubs - a Twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) and an evergreen huckleberry, both grown from cuttings taken here on our land.  A Twinberry bush grows by the small creek which comes out of the tiny pond, where it runs on the flat along the bottom of the hill, beside our pasture.  (This channel was obviously ditched for it, years ago.)  Kruckberg says Twinberry likes moist, open sites, but ours is growing in shade.  Certainly a moist site.  Lonicera is the honeysuckle genus, but this is one of the shrubby ones, not a vine.  It gets to 10 feet tall;  ours is that or almost.

I planted the Twinberry on the east (far) side of the tiny pond - and within five feet of water, in a low, wet place.  Covered it with an old wire tree cage all falling apart, but adequate for this job.  
           The huckleberry I put on the other side of the pond.  Someone had dug or pulled out a formerly planted one (close to the one I planted March 10).  I found the plant and stuck it back in.  Was that some of Rose's digging?  She has been known to dig.  A lot.  I put the new one in where something else of that earlier vintage had died.  Maybe a rhododendron.  I fertilized all with compost.        And I covered them all, including the old, dug up one.  This meant a lot of work and jerry-rigging that I won't go into.  I used the animal cage I got at the dump, its cut-out side, and a gym basket, trading these around with older plants' covers.  Cutting one side off the animal cage was really physically hard, and I was embarrassingly stupid about how to do it.  G. helped me get started in a sensible manner.  Both of my parents were mechanically inclined/interested, my mother especially so, but that gene passed right over me.
          G said, "I wish I could help you more with this project."
          I said a big part of the project is me being independent, doing it myself.  That seems true more and more as I go on with it - and as it gets harder.  I don't want much of his help.  And he's been wiring our son and daughter-in-law's room for when he returns from Mongolia - and she immigrates.  A very important job that I don't want to take him away from.
          He did say to me at one point today, from deep under a kitchen counter where he was twisted in knots trying to find the right circuit and the break in a wire (or whatever it was that kept a light socket way away in the stairway to the basement not working), this job being a precursor to his being able to successfully wire that room, being facetious, "Good thing competence is a turn-on."  **  Because he wasn't feeling very competent right then, but I've said that to him - how attractive I find the fact that he's so good at so many things.  I think most women are attracted to competence;  it makes sense evolutionarily, right?  We won't go into what men find attractive in women, as I'm not feeling so competent today, wrestling with wire, sliding out of my shoes on mud-slick hills, being so slow and obtuse.
          ** To my friend J, from writing group (if she reads this):  I know that's a run-on sentence.  A too-long sentence is okay in a blog about planting trees, I hope. I'll never write another one. 
I promise.
          Now I'm caught up with transcribing what I've written each day I've planted in my journal, and I can just write on this blog each day from now on.  And I was at 81 plants out of 80 days on this date, March 21st.