Last weekend I bought three 4-drawer dressers from IKEA to match my current MALM bed and floating nightstands.
That sounds simple enough. Keep in mind, however, that IKEA furniture comes flat-packed, meaning I had to 1) get them into my car, 2) get them out of my car and into the house, and 3) assemble them. I had my friend Astrid for #1, thank god. Bless my little heart, I unloaded them all by meself and put all three of the blasted things together the very next day because, clearly, I am insane. My lower back has been paying for it the past week.
So yesterday, in celebration of my back feeling like it might just recover at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, I pruned three trees in the backyard and moved a bunch of rocks around.
Woo!
But forget about all that. My body is my temple and I worship at the altar of Just Do It. Here are my backyard results:

This was once a Meyer lemon tree. If you look closely, you can see I left one lemon to prove it. Don't be sad. It will grow back. In the meantime, I have two big bags of lemons. Lemonade anyone?

I used to think Pepe the donkey was tacky. Now I think he is cute. Kind of the way I used to think about my Prius. If I ever have a bar-b-que, I plan to move him into the patio and use his saddle buckets as beer coolers.

Less cute and in fact downright terrifying is this little guy. I know garden gnomes are supposed to look scary to frighten away the evil spirits, but I think one of said evil spirits broke through the hole where his hand used to be and is now walking this earth. I think I will plug the hole with a flower or perhaps some moss.

This is the mystery plant I think I mentioned in an earlier post. It is everywhere along the back border. I hope it flowers soon so I can figure out what it is. The leaves are awfully pretty but too small, I think, to be a Day Lily. Time will tell.

Speaking of mystery plants, I found this parasitic vine thing wrapped around my sugar plum tree. See the small vine wrapped around the larger branch like a candy cane stripe? Here are the three stripe indentations it left on the tree trunk:

Can you see them? The tree seems fine so either I caught it early enough or it is a friendly "oh pardon me while I use you to climb towards the sun" parasite, not a destructive "let me strangle you as I suck the life force out of you" one. I chopped it off at the base just to be safe and will keep an eye on the little bugger from now on.

You cannot see things very well in this small photo, but this is the view if you are standing at the butchered Meyer lemon tree looking back along the back fence. In the far corner, I discovered a dwarf avocado tree! Good thing whoever planted it left a stick with the name tag on it. I was about to chop it down as a weed.
Yet another plant to research when to harvest the fruit, how not to kill it, etc. ::sigh::
My backyard photos are on Flickr if you would like to see them a bit larger.
Tags: gardening, pruning, garden gnome
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