We’ve hit a natural cycle of a rain-rich year in a maturing garden, to the extent that even our gutters have foot-high weeds growing (thanks to the gutter shield which admits seeds) and trees are out of bounds as well.
So Jane and I have finally admitted there ain’t no way we are climbing on the roof and the weeds along the street have gotten entirely unreasonable and we can’t wait another year for the trees.
I got on the phone and internet, reading reviews and company statements and have found a) a licensed, bonded arborist, one on the city’s list of such for the storm damage. b) a company that maintains weed-free beds by pre-emergent spray and gets rid of noxious weeds, and since they are a garden company we have some confidence they know what they’re doing. We’d rather not spray, but we’d rather not spread noxious weeds, either, and they’re too tough to pull. c) and somebody to clean the gutters and bag the contents, leaving them gutter-guard-free for the next year. We are not having spray near the fishpond: back yard, we can handle; but the side and front, oh, yes.
If these people work out, we will be happy to have them back. Rates are not that bad, and having those jobs off our plate, including the spray people saying they can delicately spray pre-emergent on the pathways in spring and leave us just the beds to maintain—
This and other sanity-saving measures.
Oregon has a filbert/hazlenut industry. Scrub jays and squirrels scavenge nuts from orchards and plant them hither and yon. They aren’t trees so much as very large shrubs, invariably multistemmed.
I had one out beside the road infected with blight. Then one day walking past I almost ran face-on into a tall stem of poison oak growing out of it’s base.
Perhaps not my best idea ever, I got out the chainsaw and cut down the whole copse. With a chainsaw, chips tend to fly! Some of the “wrong ones” got into my collar and collected around my waist, some worked their way into my briefs. I was “not a happy camper” for a couple weeks, though Benadryl pills kept me from suicide.
Good for you!
Better to put your energy towards those things that only you can do , as long as you can afford the help with the other stuff.
In a similar vein, I’ve been thinking about the effort needed for maintaining Closed-Circle. Would it be energy-efficient to choose to link up with Book View Cafe? They are a cooperative too, but a lot larger, so the effort gets spread out over many more people. They have a fair leavening of SFF writers in the mix, including Ursula Le Guin, so SFF readers are already finding their way to the BookViewCafe website.
Lynn’s computer expertise and Jane’s artistry in cover designs and experience editing/proofreading your work should be enough to gain you all entrance, and your fame would help garner more readers to their bookstore.
Their books are distrubuted to Kobo and other big ebook stores as well as being available on their own webshop, which gives them a wider audience than Closed Circle can reach on its own.
Maybe you already looked into this before you started your own Closed Circle; but with everything that’s been happening in your lives priorities may have changed over the years and it might become more attractive to share the load.