A few days before Christmas I was getting ready for work when someone knocked on my door (and Lily went wild barking). Thinking it would be UPS delivering the crock pot I bought myself as a Christmas present, I was surprised when I opened the door and there was a long skinny package bag there. On opening it I remembered that several months ago I had given a donation to the Arbor Day Foundation and they would send me 10 trees. Well here they were — not 10 but 12 little twigs that were suppose to be trees. The biggest was about 28″ tall and the shortest maybe 8″. 3 Eastern Redbuds, 4 White Flowering Dogwood, 3 Goldenraintree, and 2 Crapemyrtle. Here is a gardening challenge — getting these little sticks to someday become a flowery forest.

I didn’t have time to deal with them then, so I stuck the bunch is a vase of water and proceeded to slog through the next 2 weeks of work. On my second day off after the work marathon (first day was spend entirely in bed being ULTRA lazy), I had to come up with a solution for what to do with all of these twigs.

A bucket of baby trees — but what to do with them?

I found places for 3 of them (dogwood in the front berm, crapemyrtle south of the driveway and goldenraintree in the herb garden southwest corner) but I want the rest to go in beds I haven’t dug yet — along the back fence and near the back of the house. So I had to stick them some where and the only bare patch I could think of was the garden.

Most of my new little trees will have to live in the garden until I can come up better plan.

That will do for now.

And that crock pot I was expecting. It came the following day. Here is the first thing I cooked in it —

First crock pot adventure. Louisiana-style short ribs with spicy cole slaw. YUM!

short ribs with spicy cole slaw. Pretty yum! I think I am going to like this new toy but I am going to rename it the slow torture device — it makes the whole house smell AMAZING while the food is cooking!