bLimey!

I'm not exactly a model of patience.

When I took my plan for the Enchanted Orchard to Action Man, he agreed to help on the condition that I be PATIENT and not go planting things willy-nilly without the proper preparations.

What he meant was, not planting trees until the beds were prepared.

Not planting them until the drip watering systems were installed.

Not planting them until the paths and other infrastructure were in place.

That's all well and good, but I happened to opportunistically snap up a couple of pink-fleshed Australian Finger Limes, and they happened to be in very small containers, and there's no way they could wait a few months with their root balls all strangled like that...

...so I cheated.

The big skeleton of a dead frangipani that hunched evilly in the existing garden bed nearest the house? I decided it was time for it to go.

This did not involve an insignificant amount of work. First I had to remove all the stupid rocks, which were alive with spiders and cockroaches (but, thankfully, no green ants). Then, I had to pull up the cloth weed matting underneath.

I think the weed matting may have been responsible for the death of the frangipani. Despite two days of rain, the soil underneath the matting was bone dry. It's a good lesson in the Evils Of Weed Matting.

Forging onward, I used the excellent instructions of Michael McGroarty, found here: http://www.freeplants.com/tree-stump-removal-instructions.htm

Lo and behold, the tree came down, even in the absence of a sharp pruning saw.

Once down, I discovered it was too heavy for me to lift out of the way. Yeah. Really should have gone and bought that saw. Anyway, when Action Man came home, he helped me roll the frangipani's corpse down the front lawn, and I was able to plant the Finger Lime:

It was either return the rocks to the Place From Which They Had Come, or, in a sort of frenzied Rock Apocalypse, take them all away and replace them with pine bark, which is what I plan to use in the rest of the front garden. But I was all worn out by the effort of moving just one wheelbarrow full of rocks, and I didn't think my back would appreciate any more shovelling at that point.

So I have sneaked in a tree without doing any of that other stuff. Just one. But it gives me great pleasure to have put something in the ground. Even if it was rather heavy, horrible, clay ground that required much breaking up and mixing in sandier stuff from elsewhere.