Planting project, final phase

Well, we did it. We got all our new plants into the ground in one (extended) weekend, and we managed to do it before the rain started. Here is the final set of plantings: our new raspberry bed. 

There wasn't quite enough room to plant our dozen raspberry canes in a single row, so we put them in two staggered rows, about 18 inches apart diagonally (with a gap to provide access to our telephone box). It took four bags of mulch to cover the lot to the 6-inch depth the books recommend. (That's one point I hadn't really considered in this whole planting escapade: the plants themselves are a one-time expense, but they will have ongoing maintenance costs in compost and mulch. But still, they shouldn't need nearly as much mulch added on a yearly basis as they did this first time.)

I also got my first crop of the year into the garden: my snap peas. Actually, if the seed packet is to be believed, I probably could have planted these earlier, since it says "as soon as ground can be worked in the spring." So maybe next year I'll try and plant them earlier in hopes of getting some "snow" peas before summer starts.

Unfortunately, we now have a week to wait before another weekend rolls around and we can tackle our next outdoor chore: hacking down the big forsythia bush that's currently obstructing our access to the new raspberry bed. I could work on it during the week, of course, but Brian thinks it's more a brute-force job that he should be the one to handle. And I'll also need his participation the other two jobs we've just added to our to-do list based on this weekend's activities: cleaning out the shed and the workshop. Those don't require as much brute force, but they do require both of us to be present during the process, or else we'll never be able to find anything afterwards. Hmm...maybe I could at least start sort of planning out where to put things....

Planting project, phase 2

The takeaway from today's planting seems to be that planting shrubs is a LOT easier than planting trees. It took us only two hours to get all five of our new bush cherries into the ground—mostly because they didn't need to be set nearly as deep, so we only had to dig through turf and topsoil, instead of hacking away at the thick Raritan River clay beneath. Here are our five bush cherries, all in a row: Joel, Joy, Jan, Joel, Joy.

However, before we could move on to the task of planting the raspberry canes on the north side of the house, we had to transplant the rhubarb that was currently occupying that spot. So it took us another three hours or so to prepare a bed for the rhubarb, amend it with compost dug out of our bin, dig up the plants, put them in the ground, and cover them up again with soil, more compost, and mulch. Digging out the compost was a part of the job that was both encouraging and frustrating: encouraging because our little homemade cold-compost bin really does have some beautiful, rich, dark humus in it, and frustrating because the good stuff was right at the bottom center of the bin, where it was really hard to get at. So a lot of what actually got mixed into the soil was half-decomposed leaf mould. (The reason we used our homemade compost rather than the commercial stuff is that we have only a limited amount of bagged compost that passed our home test, and we wanted to save some of it for the raspberries.) 

We still have a few concerns about the rhubarb. It's not clear whether all the plants will survive being transplanted; the one that was the largest and healthiest of the lot, in the center position in the photo, definitely lost at least part of its root structure in the process. So we may not get any rhubarb crop this year. We do have some new plants on the way, but they won't produce anything this year. (I originally thought we might end up with too many plants for the bed, since Brian dug up three of the old ones rather than two, and I thought I'd ordered five new ones. But it turns out I only ordered four, so we can just manage to squeeze them all into a 22-foot space at 3 feet apart.)

After moving the rhubarb, we had to clear the bed of the wild strawberries that were growing all over it, nearly crowding out the rhubarb plants. I found myself wishing I could somehow move all these plants to the main part of front yard; I've been trying for years to find an appropriate ground cover to take the place of the grass, and this stuff, with its thick, low-growing mat of foliage, looked ideal. I even took the trouble to attempt transplanting a couple of them into bare patches in the yard, in the hope that they would, as this Yahoo contributor suggested, "spread like crazy and choke out [the] grass." But I suspect that if they could grow well in full sun, they would already have spread to that part of the yard by now.

After that, we decided the actual planting of the raspberries could wait one more day. They don't need to be planted deeply at all—in fact, the planting guide says that planting them too deeply is a common mistake—so we just need to dig a shallow trench, put in the plants, cover them up with dirt, and add compost and lots of mulch. And the weather forecast for tomorrow has been revised to predict afternoon showers rather than all-day rain, so we won't have to work in the wet.

The only disappointing part of the day was that, after knocking off work early in the hopes of making it to the D&D Next playtest at our local game store's Tabletop Day event, we found it had been canceled due to the illness of the guy who was supposed to run it. So instead we'll be unwinding from our day's labors with a pot of matzo ball soup and maybe one of our new "A Game of Thrones" Season 2 DVDs.

Landscapers' Index

I'm going to tell the story of today's planting activities as a series of statistics, à la Harper's Index.

Number of trees we got into the ground today: 3

Size of each hole: 3 feet in diameter by 1.5 feet deep

Approximate volume of rocks we pulled out of the holes: 15 gallons

Gallons of water applied to each tree: 6

Volume of compost used as top-dressing: 1.5 cubic feet

Volume of mulch: 4 cubic feet

Number of neighbors who stopped to comment on our activities: 2

Hours it took to get the job done: 7

Minutes I spent under a hot shower afterward: 15

Parts of my body that currently hurt: Both arms, both knees, neck

Number of loads of laundry required to wash the clothes we wore for the job: None, because we have to put them back on again and plant still MORE stuff tomorrow.

Our trees are here!

I was sitting at the keyboard, trying to figure out how to make a blog entry about getting stuff on sale from L.L. Bean sound more exciting, when I heard a ring at the doorbell. When I opened it, a burly guy handed me a long package, wrapped in white plastic, with the unmistakeable tips of branches poking out of the end. Our trees are here! Now that's exciting!

Following the instructions on the web (which were also enclosed with our packing order), I took off the outer packaging immediately. Next I was supposed to check and make sure our order was complete, but that proved a bit difficult. The insert noted that "labels and smaller plants can be hidden down inside the inner root wrapper," but I didn't want to take the inner wrapper off to check, because it also warned that "roots should not be exposed to air, even for a little while." So I dug in under the wrapper as best I could with my stubby little fingers until I finally managed to unearth eight labels: one Opal plum tree, one Mount Royal plum, one Golden Gage plum, one Jan bush cherry, two Joy bush cherries, two Joel bush cherries, six Autumn Bliss Raspberries, and six Redwing raspberries. Our new edible landscape in a bag.

Next I checked to make sure the roots were still nice and moist. Again, this wasn't so easy without unwrapping them, but the sawdust they were packed in felt moist, and the whole bundle felt sort of sodden from the outside, so I concluded that they were okay. Since it was clearly impossible to plant them right away (with Brian still at work and only three hours of daylight left and a rehearsal in Princeton at 8pm), I carried them downstairs to sit in the cool, dark laundry room until planting time.

I fired off a quick e-mail to Brian to let him know the plants had arrived, along with the suggestion that we get up early on Saturday to get them into the ground as soon as possible. He promptly came back with a counter-proposal: he's taking tomorrow off work so we can devote the day to planting. That will give us plenty of time to get the job done (and leave at least part of Saturday free to attend the International Tabletop Day festivities at our local comic/game store).

So now I'm busily plugging away at the "Planting Guide" that was enclosed with our order to make sure I know as much as possible about how to plant these guys before we start trying to get them in the ground. Here's what I've learned so far:

• As noted above, the roots are supposed to be kept moist and not exposed to air at any point, even briefly. That means that we'll probably want to dig all the holes for everything—the three trees, the raspberry canes and the five bush cherries—before we start planting.
• As we already knew from planting our ill-fated dwarf cherry tree, a "five-dollar tree" needs a "ten-dollar hole"—that is, about twice as big in diameter as the root ball. The book says to make the hole 2 to 4 feet across and 1 1/2 to 2 feet deep, with straight rather than tapered sides. In clay soil, like ours, the edges of the hole should be roughened up with the shovel to break up the clay and allow the roots to break through more easily.
• The tree should be set in with the "graft union" about an inch below ground level. I'm not sure how you're supposed to tell where the graft union is, but the book says just to plant it about an inch deeper than it looks like it was planted originally. So I guess you just look for the level to which dirt reaches up the trunk, and go just a bit deeper.
• When the hole gets filled, the soil should go back in reverse order, with the looser topsoil on the bottom and the heavier sod on top. When the hole is about half full, the tree should be soaked with 2 to 3 gallons of water before the rest of the soil is added. The tree needs to end up sitting in a "saucer," slightly below ground level, so that water will flow towards the trunk. Once it's in place, it's supposed to get another 2 to 3 gallons of water, leaving the soil "mucky" and "jello-like."
• Compost and mulch, according to the book, should go on top of the soil, not in it. The tree should get a deep layer of mulch distributed in a dish shape—about an inch thick in the middle and gradually deepening to 6-8 inches thick on the edges. The book suggests laying newspaper under the mulch to deter weeds.
• Newly planted trees need a lot of water. The book says to give them "5-10 gallons of water per tree regularly"—every day if you can manage it and by no means less than once a week, even in wet weather. They say the only time you can safely skip watering is if you feel the soil (under the mulch) and it feels waterlogged. According to the book, "Ninety percent of all tree failures in the first season are caused by lack of water."
• The owners of St. Lawrence Nurseries claim that plum trees do not like clay soil. However, I read enough sources claiming exactly the reverse that I feel no hesitation about planting them (especially since we're pretty much committed now).

And that's just the information on the trees. The bushes have a whole separate set of instructions. I'd better buckle down and learn this stuff before our big day tomorrow.

(Oh, and by the way, only one of our local utilities—the water company—has gotten back to us about our "call before you dig" query. So it looks like we are indeed going rogue.)

Who should DI when you can't DIY?

Our house was built around 1970, and our kitchen consequently lacks many of the features found in newer kitchens. I certainly don't care about granite countertops, and I don't feel any need for a garbage disposal or a double sink. Even the lack of a dishwasher isn't usually a problem, except on the rare occasions when we have enough company to produce more dishes than our drying rack can accommodate. But the one thing that I really miss is a proper range hood. Our kitchen does have a hood installed over the range, but it's the "recirculating" kind—which, as I learned when researching the topic for ConsumerSearch, is pretty much useless. This type of hood doesn't actually remove smoke and fumes at all; it just blows them around so that they don't concentrate right over the range. Some of them, like ours, have filters in them that are supposed to trap grease and mitigate cooking odors, but we quickly discovered that ours is pretty much useless for this purpose, so we don't use it.

Moreover, since our kitchen has a weird layout with the range only two inches from the nearest wall, grease tends to spatter up onto the wall, where it's hard to get off without vigorous scrubbing (which risks taking off the paint as well). Back in January, I got so frustrated after a half-hour session of fruitless scrubbing that I decided we should bite the bullet and get a proper range hood installed. Brian agreed, but said it wasn't a job he was willing to take on himself. Installing the hood itself wouldn't be a problem, but installing the ductwork would involve climbing around in the attic and cutting a hole in the roof (or in a side wall), and he didn't feel confident enough to tackle that. So we decided that I would get quotes from several contractors and go with the most reasonable one.

Well, two months later, our kitchen still has no range hood. What happened?

The problem, basically, is that I have no idea how to find a contractor to do this job. My first thought was to go through HomeAdvisor.com, a site where you provide details about the job you want done and they round up quotes from several different contractors in your area. I've tried this before with other jobs and received a flood of phone calls and e-mails within a day or two, but in this case I got exactly one response. And while the one guy who did come out seemed competent and honest, I was hoping to get at least a couple of other quotes just to see if his quoted price (around $400) was reasonable.

In the phone book, contractors are grouped under headings like "plumbing" and "electrical," and this job doesn't fit under any of them. I tried contacting a few of those listed under "HVAC" (for "Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning") on the grounds that this is technically a ventilation job, but some never got back to me at all, and those who did all said they didn't do this kind of work. I also tried a general contractor who came highly recommended by one of Brian's coworkers, with the same result. And when I tried submitting another online request through a website that focuses on remodeling jobs, describing my project as a small-scale (very small) kitchen remodel, I got no hits at all.

Google, my usual starting point for any kind of research, has provided no help in this case. When I try searching queries like "get range hood installed," I only get information about how to do this project yourself—which isn't what I want. Even if I change the search to "professional installation of range hood" or "find contractor to install range hood," I get mostly DIY information. I did find a thread devoted to this question on GardenWeb, but most people there said that (a) they did it themselves (not an option), (b) it's an HVAC job (but I've had no luck finding an HVAC professional who will do it), or (c) getting it done is the job of the contractor who handles the rest of the kitchen remodel (not relevant if this is the only part of the kitchen being touched).

At this point, I'm not sure what to try next. Should we just assume that, if it's this hard to find a contractor who handles this kind of job, the one guy we've already talked to is probably the only one we're going to find who knows what he's doing? Or should I just start paging through the Yellow Pages section on "Contractors" and calling up numbers at random?

How I became an outlaw

As you may or may not know, every time you do any kind of project that involves digging—from something as big as building a garage to as small as planting a rosebush—you're supposed to call 811 to notify your local utility companies. That way, they can mark out the property to show you the locations of buried pipes and cables, so that you don't accidentally knock out the power to your whole block with your shovel. Now, Brian and I happen to know that our upcoming edible landscaping project isn't going to run afoul of any buried infrastructure, because

1. all the cables in our neighborhood are overhead, not underground;
2. we won't be digging deep enough to hit a water main, and Brian isn't strong enough to cut through one with his shovel even if we did; and
3. all the spots where we plan to dig are spots where trees or bushes have already been planted in the past, and we don't think the utility companies could have secretly run cables or pipes under our property in the interim without our noticing anything. 

So we weren't actually too worried that we might run into any problems, but I figured, being a law-abiding citizen, that I should call the number anyway, just to make sure everything was above board.

So, back in February, I called 811 and explained what we were planning. The operator asked me for the date on which digging would begin, and I said that it would be sometime in the early spring; I wouldn't know the exact date until the plants shipped. She then informed me curtly that she could not give me a "ticket" to authorize digging without a specific date. I hazarded a guess of April 10, only to be slapped that down again: my proposed start date was too far away. I'd have to call again, no more than two weeks before my project was scheduled to start, to get a "ticket" that would be good for a month from that point.

Well, okay, so much for trying to plan ahead. Since St. Lawrence Nurseries said their plants generally shipped in early April, I made a note on my calendar to call 811 again on April 1. However, last night, on returning from Passover festivities at my parents' house, I found a message in my inbox saying that our plants had shipped on Monday the 25th and should arrive in two to five days. So I called 811 again this morning and said I had a landscaping project that was due to start "this weekend," figuring that even if the plants arrived early, they could survive until then. However, this time, after taking my particulars, the operator again asked me for a start date—between April 2 and April 10. Oh, and she wanted a specific start time, too. When I hedged, she explained that I didn't actually have to know the exact time when work would begin; this was just the deadline that the utility companies would be given to have all their survey work done. But even the earliest possible date she'd given me was still too late; even if the plants take a full 5 days to reach us, they'll arrive by Saturday and be planted on Sunday, which is the 31st of March.

Forced to give an answer in the targeted time period, I gave her a start date and time of noon on April 2. So now the best I can hope for is that the plants arrive late and the utility company finishes its survey early. The nursery did give some instructions on how to keep the plants alive if we can't get them into the ground immediately, but it did stress that the earlier they're planted, the better. And if our trees and bushes don't survive, then I'll have to wait another whole year before I can order more and try again—which also means waiting a whole extra year before the plants mature and start actually producing fruit.

So I've made up my mind that if our plants arrive before our "ticket" hasn't been filled, I'm planting them anyway. I've invested a lot of time, money, and emotional energy in these plants already, and I'm not going to risk letting them die because some idiotic bureaucrats can't figure out how to give coherent instructions that it's actually possible for homeowners to comply with. Yes, that's right, if push comes to shove, I intend to become...an outlaw gardener. I've said before that I have a lot of sympathy for the guerrilla gardening movement, but I must admit, I never thought I'd be taking part in it on my own property.

The local advantage

One of the features Brian and I like best on our new (well, two-year-old) Honda Fit is the little Maintenance Minder on the dash. It notifies you when it's time for an oil change or any other regular service, so you don't have to keep track of it all yourself. However, when the Maintenance Minder popped up a message a week or so ago that the car was due for service, it posed a bit of a dilemma for us.

You see, with our old car, we always went to a local garage, Schwartz and Nagle, for service. The biggest advantage of this was that it's only a few blocks from our house, so it was easy for me to drop the car off in the morning, walk home, and go back to pick it up whenever it was ready. (Brian could ride his bike to work, or I could drop him off at work before taking the car in.) And we'd always found the mechanics at Schwartz and Nagle to be both competent and honest. To take one example, we once brought in the old Accord because it was having trouble starting. After trying repeatedly, however, they couldn't reproduce the problem—that is, the car never failed to start for them. They could suggest a couple of things that might have been causing the problem, and a couple of ways we might deal with it if it happened again, but they couldn't actually fix it...so they didn't charge us anything. On other occasions, too, they've told us not to worry about minor problems, rather than pushing us into doing expensive repairs.

The problem, though, is that the first time I took our new Fit to Schwartz and Nagle for an oil change, they told me when I picked it up that it turns out this car needs synthetic oil—the more expensive kind. And that sounded a bit odd to me, because it didn't seem to jive with what our owner's manual said. In the section on oil changes, the manual said that 0W20 engine oil was recommended, but a synthetic oil could be used "as an alternative." In other words, it implied that the pricier synthetic oil was not actually required. Moreover, the first time we'd changed the oil on the fit, we took it to the dealer, and they used 5W20—regular oil, not synthetic. So I wondered: was it possible that our long-trusted mechanics at Schwartz and Nagle didn't actually know what they were doing with this particular car? If they were wrong about the oil, might there be other things they didn't know as well?

So when the Maintenance Minder told us it was time for the "A12" service (change the oil, rotate the tires, replace a couple of filters, inspect the drive belt, and check the brake), we dithered a bit over whether to take it to the dealer or to the local guys. The trouble with the dealership is that, although it's only about a mile from us as the crow flies, to get there the crow has to fly directly over Route 1, a major thoroughfare. There is an on-ramp from a nearby residential neighborhood that deposits you right in front of the dealership, so theoretically it would be possible to walk home along that route, but it doesn't look terribly safe.

After a bit of debate, we decided to call up the dealership and see whether they could fit us in on Saturday, and whether we would need an appointment for the service. I called and talked to a nice lady called Zenya, who said that it would be best to have an appointment, but she could indeed fit us in on a Saturday. However, when I asked her how long it would take, she said that if we wanted to wait there rather than drop it off, it would be best to bring the car in early—between 7 and 8 am. That way, we'd only have to wait about two hours. If we couldn't come in until later in the day, then the wait would be longer. So, given a choice between (a) getting up at early on Saturday and waiting two hours at the dealership, (b) getting up at a normal time and waiting three or more hours at the dealership, or (c) attempting to walk home from the dealership, and then walk back to get the car, by way of a highway on-ramp, it became clear that the only reasonable option was (d) take it to the local guys after all.

Fortunately, this turned out to be the right move in more ways than one. First of all, they were able to fit us in that very day. They got the job done in less than the two hours the dealer would have taken if we'd brought it in at 7 am on a Saturday, and I didn't have to sit there waiting for it. Second, they charged us only $96 rather than the $225 quoted to us by the dealership. Since they'd been the last ones to service the car, they knew that the air and cabin filters had actually been replaced at that time and weren't likely to need replacing again—so they just checked them and found that, sure enough, they were fine. (And even if they had done the filter replacement, the cost would still have been about $75 below the dealer's price). Moreover, our local guys also helpfully steered us toward a rebate from Mobil 1 (maker of the synthetic motor oil they use) that could save us an extra $15. They even printed out a duplicate receipt that we could mail in for the rebate, so we'd still have an original copy to keep.

And, talking of that synthetic motor oil: when I asked them about it, they explained that the reason they said our car needs a synthetic oil is that the 0W20 formulation the manual calls for is actually available only in a synthetic version. So it was actually the dealer, not our local mechanics, who was going against Honda's own recommendations by giving us a petroleum-based oil in a different weight. So, in short, this turned out to be a case in which the local business, as opposed to the big chain, had literally everything going for it. The location was much more convenient, and the service was better, and so was the price. My takeaway from this experience: always try the local business first. You may discover that there's no reason to consider the chain at all.