Today I got my apple trees
planted. Four of them in total. They are doing well but there is some
blight on the leaves and they do attract the scourge of Japanese
beetles. Which is not an unmanageable thing, but those ugly metallic
brown and green flying insect things are not for the faint of heart. I literally have beetle
juice stained fingers, often more than i'm comfortable with. There is an effective
management strategy: go through your garden and pick them off the
hotspots where they congregate, once or twice per day, in the cool of
the day when they are slow and easy to get. Better pro tip: knock them
into a light container of water and save yourself the guilt of
crushing them; but then you'll have to wait as long as two days for them to most likely expire,
which is also sort of troublesome.
I've also recently bought two blue spruce for which to plant as a
screen in the front yard to provide some psychological protection off from the mean streets, which had led to an annoying retail experience while buying them and having to fend off an aggressive Karen clerk. I decided to not plant those two trees because they would grow too big. And so I returned them, and they told me that they weren’t doing
returns because corporate policy and due to Covid! After a minor spat and some back-and-forth bickering, i ended up showing them that it said right on the receipt
that returns were “within four days” and he had to take them back; and
which he did, apparently at his discretion. If you have never worked retail, on the other side of the counter as
it were, you may not know this: as a rule they hate you.
I've also recently bought two blue spruce for which to plant as a screen in the front yard to provide some psychological protection off from the mean streets, which had led to an annoying retail experience while buying them and having to fend off an aggressive Karen clerk. I decided to not plant those two trees because they would grow too big. And so I returned them, and they told me that they weren’t doing returns because corporate policy and due to Covid! After a minor spat and some back-and-forth bickering, i ended up showing them that it said right on the receipt that returns were “within four days” and he had to take them back; and which he did, apparently at his discretion. If you have never worked retail, on the other side of the counter as it were, you may not know this: as a rule they hate you.