Sugar High

Unbelievable. 

I don’t eat sugar – hardly ever.  My son gave me a chocolate fudge coated cake thing last week that I – liked the look of but didn’t touch.  Just not a sugar freak and definitely don’t want to turn into one. 

Well, I looked at that thing in the refrigerator and decided to sit down and eat it with – 3 cups of coffee, actually. 

WOW!!  I haven’t eaten this much sugar like – in forever. 

Some seeds arrived in the mail for me yesterday.   Sapphire Dragon tree.  The images I have looked at on Google Image show them to be a nice looking tree – though kinda sparse in terms of density, but putting out some cool looking purple flowers.  The ad makes all kinds of claims, of course, of rapid growth and such – figured since I’ll basically never have enough money to buy anything even close to a mature tree, I would buy small trees and grow them up myself.

Then, I decided why not just try growing them from seed?  Definitely all this tree buying business has me learning quite a lot about how to care for trees.  Everyone always talks about pruning trees to make them canvas out to the sides, instead of growing straight up.  I have never liked cutting perfectly good branches off of any plant, but I am seeing the need for such pruning, especially young trees before  the get to the point where they’re just straight, not very wide trees.  I suppose nothing wrong with that, but a tree with a huge canopy offering lots of shade certainly has it’s advantages as well.

There is a tree growing in my back yard – it’s a desert tree of some sort - that is growing at the rate of about 4 inches per WEEK.  Last year it was 3 feet tall, it’s now almost 9 feet tall.  Only in the last couple of months has it’s growth – for whatever reason – literally taken off.  It has several offshoots growing around it on the ground - and they are growing at a fantasimical rate as well. 

For me, it’s pretty cool to watch all of this stuff happen before your eyes.  For example, the Sissoo trees I bought a few weeks ago.  One of them was nothing more than a trunk with some branches at the top and leaves.  For an almost 7 foot tall tree, that is a little – unhealthy looking.  Well, since planting it, there are sprouts coming out the sides of the trunk all up and down the barren trunk of the tree!  They started out last week and are already a couple of inches long.

My honeysuckles are also taking off like crazy.  The ones that were trampled literally to nothing but some sticks showing out of the ground?  Almost 4 feet tall worth of growth in the last 4 months or less!  Those dogs do not have access to trample them with the fence installed.  The only things that aren’t really growing at any fast rate are the evergreens.  I don’t think evergreens grow fast, anyway, regardless of how much you water them.   The Norfolk pines – 3 of them are doing well, 1 is doing okay, 1 is looking pretty bad.  The “regular” pine tree – whatever kind it is – is growing, but ever so slowly.  it was 2 feet tall when I got it, i think it’s grown maybe 3 or 4 inches in all this time.  No biggie – I just would like to get some serious growth out of some kind of tree out there for shade, I pin my hopes on the Sissoos. 

Oh, and the ficus i bought today?  Well, i have 2 of them out there already.  They do not grow at any great rate of  speed, either, but they are definitely faster growing than pine trees. 

It ALMOST makes me want to go out there – but it’s 105 right now and the high of 108 or 109 – whichever report you believe – is definitely a real possibility.  Whatever the case, I am taking a break from the heat today and just – watching movies on satellite.

ben