Carrie is busily preparing for the launch of her Art Detox online course and has muttered a few times as we enter or exit the car that she has to get out and weed the garden one day.This is Joseph’s BMW that has become Carrie’s car to use because he did not want to put the company monitoring system in it. Instead the system was installed in Carrie’s Honda so that is what Joseph drives to work leaving the Beamer for Carrie.  She doesn’t complain about it either.

The garden is comprised of a row of trees down the side of the house and a big dirt patch at the back door where Joseph keeps the BBQ.  Why the landlord didn’t cover the whole area with paving stones none of us can figure out.  (The door and window behind the BBQ in the first photo belong to “the maid’s quarters.”  Many locals and expats have a live-in maid and lots of the houses are built with a room for a maid.

Several of the trees along the wall have died since the landlord planted them.  Carrie took a cutting of one and stuck it into a pot in the livingroom in the hopes it will root and can be transplanted outside.  It is actually doing quite well.  In another month or so once it has grown a new leaf or two she will move it outside.The other day John went out and used a shoe lace and two picture hangers to tie back one of the trees that was leaning way over the walkway and then pulled most of the weeds (there were not that many really, certainly nothing like the amount of weeds our garden at home cultivates).

We decided that today we would do some extensive trimming on the trees to remove some of the lower growth and therefore encourage them to go up and not out.  We took clippings from some of our cuttings and dipped them into a liquid fertilizer Carrie had in the maid’s room that is used as a storage room and stuck them into the ground.  A drink of water was given to each as well.  Maybe one or two of them will root and survive and fill in some of the blank spots.  If not, oh well; we tried.

One of the plants was very unruly and bushy. It had numerous stalks coming up from the base and many sprouting every which way.  We got brutal with it and trimmed most of them off, then we braided the three ‘main’ stalks we left intact and John used the other shoelace fastened to the wall to keep it upright.  He also took one of the cuttings and stuck it into the back corner of the dirt patch.  If this plant is supposed to be all low and bushy it can go to town over there.

John picked up an armload of the larger clippings and deposited them into the dumpster across the road then he went into the house to put a new appliance plug in the laundry room so the washing machine will quit shorting out and stopping.  When Carrie made a quick trip to the grocery store this morning John went along to see if he could find a replacement outlet.  He had to get the entire unit but now the washer should work properly.

 While John was doing his electrician thing I cleaned up all the leaves and dirt and swept all the pavers.  Carrie is pleased as punch that we did it for them and very happy with how tidy the area now looks. She laughingly said she was going to show the photos to her parents so they can see what will be expected of them if they come over to visit some day.

It wasn’t a very big job, didn’t take us very long either, but I agree with Carrie the ‘garden’ looks much neater now.

BEFORE                                                                          AFTER

And, just in case all of the cuttings we stuck in the ground die, we put one of each kind of tree into the livingroom pot where it may survive and thrive.