Crepe Murder

I'm so happy today because I can finally start talking about gardening again. Since moving into our new house last fall there wasn't much to talk about. There didn't seem much use in getting started on anything with winter right around the corner, and there was so many other things to do. But today is another matter all together.

The sun is shining very brightly outside, but the air is still really chilly. The birds are singing and the wind is blowing in the trees. One of the projects that has been on my radar lately is pruning our crepe myrtle trees. For those who don't know what a crepe myrtle is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepe_myrtle Part of the deal with the new housing development were two trees in the front yard. The ones that were there had been planted in the middle of the drought and looked dead, so I asked for them to be replaced. I asked for crepe myrtles if possible. When I was growing up, we had two of them that my grandmother had planted growing in front of the house and I thought it would be nice if I had some again. I was reading an article in Southern Living that was trying to prevent people from committing Crepe Murder by beheading their trees in the mistaken belief that it would give the tree a beautiful form.

So with my newly acquired pruning tools I set forth to do battle with my own. For the most part it was pretty straightforward, but one of my trees has a split in the main trunk. I'm going to have to figure out what I need to do with it so I can get started with retraining it if necessary.

I've also been poring through gardening magazines and trying to figure out what I want to plant where. I have made enormous lists of what I want to plant and have to keep pruning it back. Cost is a constraint in this because we need to get a fence put up in the back yard first before we do anything else.