Mishap in the garden, or should I say - Hit and Run -

Had a very busy day yesterday. Early morning hours on the computer, getting ready for a cookout, entertaining all afternoon, enjoying the company of such dear people and watching all the kids enjoying the pool all day. Good people, good weather, good food! A great time for all! Enjoying walking all out to the front to say good bye, waving to all as they start backing out of the driveway, go in to clean up. Then go out to get the dog, and..............

I noticed a weed that I am trying to identify and have let keep growing right between the cobblestone bordering the garden from the driveway.

(The cobblestone that I rescued from a construction dump pile. The ancient cobblestone that had been dug up from the streets of Boston while new sewer lines were installed. The cobblestone that I so carefully placed as a border edge on the top of the far slope, even using landscape lining, and digging out just the right size ditch for the cobblestone, with my Cape Cod Weeder. I know you hear me, girls, all of us who have done the picking up and the hauling, loading into the car, unloading at home, and the loading of the wheel barrel and the lugging to the right garden spot, and the unloading, and the work involved getting a spot ready, and getting all the stone in place, lining it up, just the way only you could possibly imagine it. Of course, no one else can do it just the way you do, so of course you want to do it yourself.

Also just imagine the shock in the construction company owner's eyes, an immigrant Italian, who knows the only place for a woman is in his kitchen and in his bed! So imagine this nice Italian laborer, who speaks only broken English, who gets the request from his accountant (you got it, it's me! I was an accountant in my younger days) usually dressed in a suit and heels, to be allowed to schlep over to his yard and relieve him of all his discarded cobblestone! After we got through the language barrier and I convinced him that I really did want the cobblestone, and had a good use for it, and yes I would be picking it up myself and installing it myself, he agreed to let me have it .....but of course he's Italian, so I had to pay him for his rubbish! I was happy to do it to have a piece of old Boston in my gardens in Wrentham.

So the story goes on.. the cobblestone made a great border for my husband to be kept out of the garden with the lawnmower. The cobblestone gave his tractor just the right height to travel on, and width to keep it from getting into the garden. So fast forward about 15 years. I had forgotten the
cobblestone was even there - I was in that garden looking for a plant and noticed the stone.

"Aha," I thought, "I had forgotten about you, and now you are in hiding," having been covered over by the ground cover invasion from the hill.

"You need to be rescued. What can I do with all of you?"

I decided to line the driveway with as many as I had, to replace the varied size and shaped stones I had accumulated there over the years, and see how far I could get. You know the drill. Crawl in under all the shrubbery, contend with the ground cover, watch out for poison ivy, find poison ivy, get up to get the spray, come back, spray the poison ivy, fight with the English Ivy for domination in the area, use my trusted Cape Cod Weeder to pry out each cobblestone, as they had all been placed touching each other for a smooth tractor ride, fill the wheel barrel, lug it over to the driveway, make a ditch for it, line them up, go get more stone, and on and on.)
To conclude this diversion, I had started it before I got sick. Ended up with a great part of the driveway done, but ran short and got sick before I could finish it.

As so I digressed again. Do you all remember what a tangent is?? That thing you learned about in Math class years ago?? Well, remember when you thought to yourself,

"Self, when will I ever need to know what a tangent is? How will this ever help me in my lifetime?"

(And yes I was a Math major in college!) Well folks, a tangent is what I just went on, veering totally away from what was to have been the topic of this blog!!

so again...............

I noticed a weed that I am trying to identify and have let keep growing right between the cobblestone bordering the garden from the driveway. It was lying on the ground, so I go to investigate................ It's bent in 2 places!


It certainly wasn't like that this morning. Then I looked a bit further and

THIS IS WHAT I SAW



Someone had run over a part of my gardens

Someone had run over my copper path marker and my solar light




Someone had run down my double orange Daylilies,




stopping just short of my pink Portulaca.




Someone had crushed my pink blooming Sedum.




Someone had messed with my cobblestone, now out of alignment, mowing down the Cranesbill Geranium, and the burgundy Sedum.




Someone had hit and run......

Someone had not wanted to have to tell me, the boss's wife!!

We had a hit and run on our hands! .

And how funny, as it was a group of Insurance Adjusters and support staff that was here!!! I should call in a claim and have them come out and document all of this!!! Wouldn't my hubby just love that waste of his staff's time!! They had been talking about crazy claims all afternoon!!

So I tried to comfort the plants, knowing I was just too tired to help them out last night. The light and marker got put back in place, albeit the marker is now permanently bent. I went to bed and faced it first thing this morning.

And this is what I saw when I looked at the damage more closely. About 8 Daylily stems were fractured, some a simple fracture, that just required support with the metal support frame I use for Peonies in the spring. Three of the plants, however, had suffered compound fractures. One had just one, another plant had multiple fractures and was split wide open a good 4 inches. And the third was just to far gone, split up the entire stem.



And you know how you never know when you will need a certain skill? Well, when I was about 16, one of my sisters who was 2 at the time had a fall and fractured her arm. My mom, being pregnant with her 8th child (such good Catholics!), was unable to go with her to the hospital, so I went. I was the oldest daughter in an Italian family. Need I say more? I was the surrogate mom anyway, so Terri was quite content to have me hold her and comfort her on the way to the hospital.

Did I mention we were on vacation on the Cape? Well, we had to wait for them to locate a Pediatric Orthopedic doctor. Terri was such a good little angel, waiting patiently, cradled in my loving, protective embrace. So Terri was scared and wanted me with her during the fracture repair, and the doctor actually used me as his assistant. I held the arm in place after he had reset the bone, while he was preparing to cast it. We spent the night together in her hospital bed. And that, is how I learned about fixing fractures!!

So being faced with this type of injury I set to work. I assessed the damage, got stakes, netting, twisties, scissors, a kneeling pad and camera, to document the repair, and set forth on my mission. To do my best to rescue the aforementioned stems. The plants themselves were run over, but remained in tact, just needing individual supports to stay upright.

This is what a compound fracture in a plant stem looks like. A simple fracture is just a bent stem, no skin ruptured.



I tried to repair the fracture just by wrapping netting around the stem, but it kept falling over.
So I got a support rod, and placed it next to the plant, being careful not to push it into the fleshy roots below the surface, not wanting to traumatize the plant any further.





Then I used a trusty twistie to hold the stem upright against the support rod as I worked below on the fracture.



I found that I needed to support the stem just below the simple fracture and above it to support the weight of the flower and buds that are in the process of forming.



I continued to carefully wrap the netting, the same as what I've been using to contain seed pods in the gardens, being careful to hold the fractured area in place as I wrapped it in order to keep it together. I had to be mindful of using the right tension with the netting, as I knew I needed to support the fracture, enough to hold the stem in place and at the same time not wrap so tightly as to choke the stem. Felt like a doctor setting a complicated break.

As I finished the first piece of netting I saw that the fracture extended beyond the netting and would require an additional piece of netting.




Applied the next piece of netting, and the stem is standing with the support of the rod and twisties.




Set the other stem fracture, and proceeded to put in small supports to hold the individual plants upright.


Fluffed up the pink Sedum and Geranium, straightened out the burgundy Sedum, pulled the dwarf Iris to upright positions.


Now it is up to Mother Nature to do her piece of the healing, and we'll have to wait and see what happens. All the stems, except the too-far-gone one have their blooms opening up this morning.

(For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Daylilies. They produce one flower each day, and it lasts for only that 1 day. One plant can stay in bloom for quite some time depending on its age and the number of bus it is able to produce - okay so now I have another thing to make note of and dare I say, to be counted!!)

It is now 9:15, have finished my second post today, due to the unusual circumstances leading up to it. I'm 5 hours into my day and ready to get gardening. Oh, and did I mention I just finished downloading my 1075th photo??!! And that is just for photos taken this gardening season!!