What a Long, Strange Week It's Been.

Once, my south garden looked something like this:

Lush, green, with ample shade from a large box elder tree in the corner. 

In the space of one evening (last Sunday, to be precise), it suddenly looked like this:

Yep.  It looks rather like the tree decided to eat my house.  We've had so much rain, and the ground is so wet, that it just took one rather strong gust of wind from the south and whammo, down came the tree.  It was rather unexpected.  Sure, we were getting a storm rolling in, but there was hardly any wind in it, aside from that one gust.  About four inches of rain, of course, but that seems to be the normal for this summer's weather.  I had just finished a shower, and was standing there, dripping into my towel, when suddenly the house shuddered, a cannon boom happened, and there was a brilliant explosion of green-blue fire outside the bathroom window.

Nothing like feeling all naked and exposed during imminent peril.  There I am, in the dark, fumbling for a shirt and my phone to call 911.  My lazy weekend ended with...well...a bang.

Roots are now pointed to the sky.  And all those shading branches were suddenly smothering everything underneath them.  They also managed to yank the power lines completely off the house, yank down the lines running up the easement, snap TWO power poles cleanly, and smashed up my currant bushes and raspberry canes and dislodged the coop run fencing and generally made a terrible mess.

It smushed the soffet and made quite a lovely dent in the roof.  Hard to see in the above picture, but once a crew of friends came armed with chainsaws and we moved a whole LOT of tree, it's a bit easier to see:

Bang.  Whallop.

With any luck, it'll have caused enough mayhem and destruction that the insurance will help out with a new roof.  I'm glad it wasn't worse, but really, the whole series of unfortunate events has given me a bunch more gray hairs.

So now, my south garden looks more like this:

Sheesh.  Talk about naked and exposed.  My yard feels so open.  All my privacy is gone, for goodness sake.  I'm really feeling odd about it, but as there's nothing I can do about it, I suppose it will grow on me.  Of course, now I have all kinds of south-facing full sun exposure to play around with.  I'm thinking more small fruit (perhaps I shall rename it "Small Fruit City"?), maybe some improved veggie beds or super-sized cold frames...or another smaller hoophouse?  Hmm.  Well, having a tree fall down certainly has opened up some new options in the garden department.

Now, about that roof...