I Hate My Yard!

We got a letter in the mail regarding the weeds on our side yard. We are on a corner, above the street and there is a twenty foot high slope on the side of our yard. One hundred feet long. The top half was all weeds. Because I had fired the gardener last year when he never showed up. Well, the city told us to remove the weeds. So, as it got near the time of the deadline and I realized I wouldn't be able to do it and the new gardener hadn't showed up to do it yet, I called and explained that we were having a hard time getting the gardener here and could we have a little more time. So the guy looks at the pictures and says, "Once you remove the weeds, you will have only dirt and that is not acceptable. There must be something covering the dirt. You can have until January 2 to remove the weeds and put something in place of it." But he wanted to be sure we would have it done by then. Great. So, I got in touch with the new gardener, Rohan. I explained that I had fired the previous gardener because he never showed up. He thought that was a good reason. Well, he told me, when he came out, that it would be about $100 to remove the weeds. Cool. Not bad. I told him I had a deadline. Not a problem. He'd be back tomorrow. Three days later, I call. What happened? I'll be there tomorrow, sorry. Okay, you'll be here tomorrow? Yes. Two days later he shows up at like 5:00pm. It's blowing ice cubes and he's out there working on the yard. He did part of it, then shows up like two days later. It went on like this until a few days before Christmas. He finished it. We went outside to give him the second half of the money and he was gone already. I called two days later and said to call me so we could finish it and give him his money and he didn't call back.

SO, we go to this nursery on Saturday. Get like forty 1-gal. plants that are supposed to grow into good sized bushes and shrubs, four to five feet wide. At $3-4 each, we get like six of this, ten of that, so we can put them in groupings and make it look nice. Get half a dozen bags of compost and we are off to a good start. Then we ask the guy, do you know of anyone who can help us with this? Sure, he knows a guy named Greg that buys plants here, just moved to the area. We call him and he comes out the next day. Sunday. Nice, easy going, returns phone calls. He tells us he wants to put a cedar hedge at the top of the slope and a bunch of 5-ga. rock pines (not in the Big Plant Book and we don't know what they are) in as well as some mulch. Like $1350. And that is with his discount for the first customer of the year. He has those plants, is even willing to trade for the plants we bought. He makes his own mulch, has his own plants and even when we cut the number of plants in half, half the mulch, I do a portion of it, it still would never be less than $800. His base cost for labor for two days was like $500, plus $300 for the mulch. But he was cool with us calling him in a couple of hours to let him know what we decided. Well, we figured at least it would get done and we wouldn't get fined from the city. So, we call him back. He took another job and can't do anything for us until the 6th of January. Nice. Didn't tell us there was the possibility he would take on another job. Oh well. Probably for the best. That is, if I can get the nice, understanding man at the city to grant us another extension. He wasn't very. But, we removed the weeds, got our trash can behind the fence (it was visible from the street, a possible misdemeanor offense that was also on the citation notice) and we bought the plants to go on the slope. We are much further along than we were. We just have to plant the plants and put the mulch down. Will he be nice and grant us another extension or are we going to be fined $500 because we couldn't get a gardener here during the holidays to finish the job? I left two messages for Rohan and hopefully he will call me back and I can get him out here. I have never planted stuff like this before and it is especially hard on the slope. It is STEEP! It is hard to stand on or walk up, let alone plant anything on! The Hubby still has blood on his knee from when he kneeled down and came down pretty hard on it. He already had an infection in his leg and that made it worse. He will probably need to have it drained. He will not be going up on the slope. Yeah, I've got an extra grand to put into this right now, right after the holidays and all.

We'll see what the guy at the city says. Hopefully he had a nice holiday and won't throw the book at me. I can hope, can't I?