As I've mentioned in previous posts, once our house was built I kinda went a little crazy and ordered a million plants.
I ordered plants to make a shade flower garden, I ordered vegetable seeds, I ordered fruit and nut trees, I ordered asparagus crowns.... I ordered IT ALL.
At the time, I assumed that there was plenty of space for everything and I'd just stick it where I could. Once the orders were placed and I started to look around, I quickly realized that a lot of space that would otherwise work well for planting was in partial shade (not good for fruit plants). Other space wouldn't work because we plan on building something there in the future.
I'll be honest, I started to panic a tiny bit. Where was I going to put all this and not have it be a giant eyesore?
Well, when they finished our house they joined up our old driveway with the construction driveway which turned into a circular driveway. In the middle of the new circular driveway was a few scrubby pines and a bunch of sweet gum trees. In other words, nothing I particularly wanted to keep.
Ok! So maybe I could get the existing trees cleared from the middle of the circular driveway and plant a good part of my mini-orchard in there! It would look cute, there would be good harvesting access, and there wasn't anything else planned for that space.
About 3 weeks ago I started what I innocently assumed would be a simple process to getting the middle of the circular driveway cleared.
Try #1 - I asked a few chainsaw-owning family members over to just cut down the trees and we'd haul them into the woods. Cheap, fast, and simple. Well, it turns out that one of the pines might come down on the house if it wasn't taken down just right, so we nervously decided to bring in an expert.
Try #2 - I contacted a company that clears land, figuring they could just bring some big equipment out and push the trees over. This company scheduled time to come out and take a look and give me a quote on this project 4 separate times, and never once actually made it out here. After the 4th time I gave up. Time was getting away from me.
Try #3 - I called all of the tree service companies I could find that would operate in my area (around 5) and got a hold of several of them. Only ONE company actually followed through and came out to provide a quote. WTF?! The one company who did come out were extremely nice and professional, but the quote they gave me was WAY higher than I had budgeted for this.
Around this time my plants - all of them from an array of different companies - arrived. The panic hit big time. I didn't want my investment on all of these plants to go to waste!
Try #4 - Jack called a landscaping company who came out that same day to give us a quote. The quote was for doing quite a bit less than the previous company and was $50 more expensive. I guess having trees removed is just way more expensive than I thought it would be. DANG.
So at this point I just call the first company back and schedule them to come out ASAP. They initially tell me that can make it out by the end of this week or the first of next week, but I explain my time crunch (and I think they can hear the panic in my voice over the phone) and very sweetly move me up to this Thursday.
So all this means that I'll FINALLY be able to plant everything about 2 weeks after it arrived. Hopefully that will be soon enough and it will all make it.
It also means I've been trying to get the middle of the driveway cleared for about 6 weeks.
Who knew it would be such a crazy process?
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