Never Leave Marty Alone in the Garden

Marty Matzke​ is a wonderful, awesome man.....and I love him always. He is a great handyman, he can do just about anything that needs done around the house...BUT...he is NOT to be trusted around my landscaping. It has taken years to get the plants to grow abundantly as they are, and I enjoy my jungle, which is my oasis in this high desert of northern Arizona.

Last fall we had to cut back the wonderful grapevine due to black rot.So it hasn't come back in all it's glory yet.

I have been very protective of all the plants this year as I realize just how old they are and a lot of them need to be moved this coming fall.

There isn't a whole lot that I can do by myself due to my knees both being OOC (Out of Commission), and my balance is pretty well shot, and I have already fallen once this year going out to feed the birds.  I hate to ask Marty to do something that I used to be able to do with no problem. So, I decided while he was working a 48 hour shift that I could simply put some garden fencing onto the pergola and attach it to the eave of the house so that the wisteria will grow over the top of the pergola. 

The wisteria has just become this huge jungle plant and when I go out into the back yard with it all unkempt I always think of when we lived in Owatonna, MN and we would go dancing out at the Jungle and I sing out loud, "Welcome...to the Jungle." 

So I managed to drag the extension ladder out to the back yard and get it into position and even got the green garden fencing attached to the pergola, then I ran out of staples to attach it to the eave of the house, so I had to stop working on it. When Marty came home I simply asked him after we made a trip to get staples, if he could finish that portion. He went out to look at it and laughed at my work and said that would never do. He would fix it right after he got the irrigation line running that he was working on. Two days later he finished his project and was ready to work on the wisteria. He was outside for a long time while I was in the house working on my scrapbook journal. He came inside to shower and nap before going into work that evening. He told me that he couldn't finish the project because he needed to order more fencing.

I go outside to see why in the world he would need more fencing and I almost fell over in a dead faint.

He had taken down the English ivy from the posts that the vines had grown up on. He had stretched the green fencing between the posts and stapled it half way up the posts. Why? What just happened to my beautiful ivy? It was all a mess. My Irish came on full blown. I went into the house and asked him what in the world was he thinking? He told me that I had told him I wanted fencing put up there. I told him I had not! He insisted that I had, and I knew that his German was up so I just went outside immediately and tore down the fencing and got the garden tape out and had to pull the ivy back up and attach it with the garden tape and ties back to the poles.  I cancelled the order for more fencing 

A foot note here, he had removed the garden bench and the beautiful iron headboard I had behind it. So I had to trim everything back to where the cement slab begins so I could see where everything should go back to.

It took me a couple of hours to get it done, a job that the two of us have done together before, but I think my adrenalin was maxed out because I was finishing it when he comes out ready for work and asks me why I took it down. I did not answer him, he just got one of those 'You talkin' to ME?" looks and left me alone.

This is the before Marty photo

This is how I left it that night.

 

That evening I really did some heavy thinking because I knew that I would have never asked him to put wire up for the English Ivy, it doesn't grow that way. Then, a light bulb came on in a corner of my brain and I remember having a conversation with him LAST SUMMER about a totally different garden area...one that doesn't even exist now. I had wanted a vine that I had planted in the dog park to be trained to grow up the back of the house on our bedroom side. I asked him LAST SUMMER when we had that garden to please put some up. Well, our Grand-dog Charlotte ate some of the purple grass plants that I had planted on each side of the vine, and she got very, very sick. I dug those things up and Marty filled in the garden and I put my blue bottles over that section. No more plants in the dog park!

When he got home the next day I explained everything and my Irish was back to normal and his German was back to normal. Love was in the air! He moved the bench back into place and I got the rest of the runners attached to the pole.

His next day off he worked on getting the wisteria vine trailing onto the pergola. Know how he did it? If you guessed that he used my idea you would be right.He attached some green fencing to the pergola, and then after fixing two places where plaster was coming down and bees could get in, he attached the fencing to the eave of the house like I had intended all along. Yet he said that his was was better than mine. I still do not understand the difference except he used something other than the staples to attach it to the eave.

 So at the end of the day  we were both happy with the way everything looked and my oasis is back to it's peace filled status.

What have I learned from this opportunity for growth?

NEVER LEAVE MARTY UNSUPERVISED WHEN IT COMES TO LANDSCAPING PROJECTS.