Edge Work & a Walking Tree

I watered the trees this morning and my lemon tree looked like it had been out partying all night.  The leaves were turned north and the dirt around the base was all messed up.  It's LA and my little Sustainable Urban Farm experiment might draw some attention from sketchy people.  There are more weirdos per capita in LA than anywhere else I've lived.  Nothing major happened, so I brushed it off as "no big deal".

Since the dirt was all scattered about, I raked it back into a ring around the tree.  Then I felt like doing the edge work along the side walk.  The grass or "wild native vegetation" has not been tended to in over seven years, with growth about 8 inches over the edge of the sidewalk.  Amazingly enough, the amount of soil and compostable material I harvested almost filled our green planter box.  In the picture to the right, you can see the unkept edge in the foreground and the clean edge work in the background.


Then my buddy William from the auto repair shop came walking over.  He told me that when he got to work this morning, there was an old man digging up the lemon tree.  By the time William realized that the old man was a thief, the lemon tree was in a cart and going down the street!  William said, that was when he realized he needed to chase the old man and stop him.  The old man saw William coming and began to run.  Being old and pushing a cart with a tree in it, the elderly gentleman knew that his thievery would be thwarted.  So the old codger pulled the tree from the cart and dumped it on the side walk.  Looking back and knowing William was still going to catch him, he ditched his cart and took off running.  Again, the nature of the culprit's elderly-ness, William caught him no problem.  By the time my friend had a chance to say, "What the Hell are you doing?"... the old man's knees began to knock and down he went.  In that moment, the shear optimism of the old fart was astounding.  Everyone knows that the maturation/fruiting process of a lemon tree takes years, but this filibusting fellow was on borrowed time.  No, no he didn't die.  He just smacked his face pretty hard on the sidewalk and William had to help him back to an upright position.  At that point, William told me that he thinks the old man isn't going to ever come back!  Wow, what a day!