Mr. Leclerc's New Home

Saturday morning, we were having breakfast after my rehab run.

"We need to go look at our roses after breakfast. They're a little overgrown."

"Agreed."

Out we went. We have five rose bushes along the side of our house. One was there when we moved in. The other four we planted at the end of our first summer, when the rose bushes were on sale at the grocery store. Each one was named after a famous Canadian. Felix Leclerc was the runt of the litter, a wee scrappy bush covered in thorns and tucked in almost behind the central air unit.

The rose bush that was already there was pretty well established. We bought a black, rod-iron trellis-thing to try to tame it and my job every spring and fall was to cut it back into submission.

This year, it seems that the entire Canadian contingent of rose bushes have taken off.

Here is that it looked like on Saturday morning.

We debated. Do we buy some more of those individual rose trellises? Functional, but boring. Doug grabbed a pencil and a notepad. We talked, he sketched. We came up with a plan. We headed to Home Depot and came home with...

Two 4x4s, six 2x2s, four spikes to hold the 4x4s, a box of screws and a sledgehammer.

 Doug got the grunt work (ie. hammer the spikes into the ground without killing the roses or damaging the house).

I was in charge of the paint and the roller...and the iPhone camera. 

By this point it was getting late so we left the paint to dry until morning and headed in for dinner. 

Sunday dawned bright and sunny. We went for our bike ride. I did my 12 minute rehab run. And then we were back at it.

The plan was taking shape. 

We measured, we cut, we drilled...and we tried not to get too damaged by the thorns.

We tied the roses to their new home - getting very damaged by the thorns.

And voilà! A do it yourself rose trellis. Mr. Leclerc, the little Frenchman on the far right, put up a bit of a fuss while I secured him to the 2x2 but after a harsh "Tais-toi!" he settled down. 

And that is how we spent our weekend.