Garden Race

We were franticly trying to get the yard ready for Sergio’s party frustrated by all sorts so things - including the fact that the week prior was the big Mexican celebration of Day of the Dead – and nobody wanted to deliver, work, or do anything.  We basically bribed our three workers to come.

Earlier that week we spent two hours at a gigantic – and I mean huge – nursery.  We walked for miles with a very knowledgeable women checking off things from the list prepared by the guy who did the landscaping proposal.

This is what $1,000 dollars worth of plants looks like before they are planted. My only consolation is that in anyplace else, this load of, literally, 128 trees, plants, bushes, would have costs five times as much.

This is me with our first limes – basically everything that fell off the trees as we moved them.

All week long the workmen, including the two of us, have been leveling the lower levels of the lot and placing a layer of tezontle on top of it.  Tezontle is a red volcanic stone that absorbs a ton of water and is especially useful here during the dry season.

Then two trucks arrived with 24 square meters of top soil. It took six of us two hours to move it off the truck and get about half of it dumped in piles around the lot.

Then the sod arrive – 350 sq. meters – this was over 1000 pieces of rolled sod.  There were three of us in the truck and another three up top piling the rolls.

We treated the worked to a taco lunch and multiple beers before they left to join their families for Day of the Dead celebrations.

Here’s out three guys, Roberto, Gabriel and Samuel laying the first sod around the pool.

Unfortunately we were so beat we passed on going into town to enjoy the festivities.