winter planting

Ben sent me pictures of the house in progress last night and I'll be sure to post them early next week. By then I'll be able to follow them up with shots of the final product (final meaning primed but still not painted).

In the meantime I thought I'd share our winter planting adventures- for a few laughs!

About three weeks ago Ben was offered a couple of "bushes" and because we are desperately in need of some landscaping around the house, he didn't want to pass them up. Thinking it would be easy to load them into the back of his truck and bring them home, he was more worried about getting them into the ground- the Weather Channel was calling it one of the coldest weeks of the year.

I wasn't entirely sure of Ben's plans and was on my way out the door when he called me and said "get ready, I'm on my way home and I've got two TREES in the back of my truck." Meaning a) they were clearly bigger than bushes and b) I was actually going to have to help plant them! When Ben first mentioned we might have to do a little landscaping he actually used the word "I" and he didn't say it was going to have to be done on the coldest day of the week (I'm pretty sure it was 15 degrees outside)!

Before I get on with the story I just want to mention for those of you who don't know, I have the opposite of a green thumb and made it very clear when we first bought the house that Ben would in charge of the landscaping and I would stick to the interior of the house.

Anyway, Ben pulled the truck up to the front of the house and soon realized getting the "bushes" (particularly the 500lb. one wedged in front) was not going to be so easy.
He started chipping away at the frozen roots to try to break some of the excess dirt off. He was hoping it would lighten the load a little, but it was too frozen and little to no progress was being made.
After much frustration it became very clear that the only way we were going to get the bush out of the back of the car was by tying a rope to it, tying a rope to a nearby tree on our property..
and Ben pulling the truck away.. very quickly!
In the meantime, I was running in and out of the house to warm up.
Once the tree fell off the truck, we shockingly were able to pretty easily dig a hole..
And then the bigger issue became getting the tree into the hole.. as it was way too heavy to drag ourselves.
Ben was able to hitch it to the truck and drag it a little closer and he continued to try to chip away at it with no luck.

After a few more minutes of frozen fingers and toes, we opted to call it a day. We dropped the other (much lighter) bush into the hole..
and decided next time we'll wait for the ground to thaw before we make any landscaping decisions!

Ben was able to cut the bigger bush up and get rid of the branches, but the frozen stump is still hanging out in our yard- as it will until the temperature warms up.