Still not free of fever at night, still sick, but today I could do stuff. (Yeah, I watered the trees Tuesday because I had no choice. It was a near thing, though.)

Today I saw a green pop-up ad selling olives and I wasn’t buying–I went out there this evening, clippers in hand.

When the tree guys stump-grindered the last of that dying olive tree, there was this wide, deep pile of sawdust afterwards. Not long after I planted my sour cherry in the middle of it and hoped.

It’s still this tiny little thing.

In the last month somehow clusters of quickly-hardening stalks have risen from the dust in a half-circle at the outer perimeter there. The first time surprised me; after that I kept an eye out and got to them earlier. I put large rocks where they’d been but wait a week and up they come again, sometimes in a new spot.

It’s not much of a contest, though, especially the ones trying to work their way out from those rocks. But it does make me wonder how much the English Morello has had to fight for root space–and it came with a broken-off major root. You don’t get first pick on bare-roots in March. But I did get my tree.

And so, wearing a flouncy silk skirt that I put on this morning to make myself feel better even if my body didn’t just then and knowing I was clothed ridiculously for working in the dirt (but eh, it handwashes), I got the tips of those clippers down below the soil line and just cut cut cut.

Because if I stopped and rested and changed I knew I might not get it done.

And then here’s the amazing thing: in March it was all yellow layered flat flakes of sawdust there. What was coming up in my hands was a well-crumbled rich, rich black soil any gardener would leap to have.

I think that sour cherry is going to end up just fine.