Optimizing my Garden

One of the things that endeared us to the apartment we purchased here in Modi’in back in 2003 (wow, have I been living in suburbia for that long?) was the lovely garden. I didn’t know at the time but I was quite delusional about my ability to give the garden the attention it needed to avoid it turning into a jungle.

We have what you call a “high maintenance” garden. Combine that with “time management issues,” one member of the household who deals with “chronic pain” (that would be me) and “not enough money to spend on a gardener to come every two weeks to weed” and you are headed for a garden disaster.

Sure, I can mow the lawn every week, it’s not a big deal, takes a relatively small amount of effort and about twenty minutes. However, we have a two different areas where we have various trees, bushes and plants surrounded by dirt. Without weeding these areas frequently, they quickly become overrun. It got to a point where we simply could not enjoy being outside and frankly, I was somewhat embarrassed for guests to see its condition.

We needed a solution. And that solution was volcanic tuff. I envisioned the two problematic areas covered with a layer of plastic to keep the weeds out and layered with copious amounts of ubiquitous reddish tuff. It’s aesthetically pleasing and I would only have to pull out the rare weed that was strong enough to break through the plastic. Luckily, the gardener I brought in for an estimate agreed with me.

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Construction

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The Date-ing Game

The municipality of Modi’in did something uber-cool this year. There are dozens of palm trees lining the boulevards of the city which every two years produce thousands and thousands of delectable dates. This year the Department of Gardens and Landscaping of the city harvested the fruits and offered them to city residents for free. Ziva, [...]

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My favorite eateries in Israel

Much thanks to tafka for letting me coerce her into”tagging” me to write about my favorite restaurants in my beloved country. You’ll notice I like cheap ethnic food. I also love foi gras, but I don’t go to upscale joints that often, so I decided to keep it real. The rules: 1. Add a direct [...]

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Overheard in a Modi’in Cafe….

So I’m sitting at a nice little cafe with my friend Frankie watching the US-Ghana World Cup match. This guy comes in, sits at the bar, takes a look at the screen and says, “Which team is Ghana?”

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‘The View from Here’ on NRG

Big up to NRG’s Hanan Cohen for writing (Hebrew link) such nice things about several Israeli bloggers who blog in English in his Internet column. He Hanan, check out my other blog and podcast, Zion B’Ayin! He had this to say about ‘The View from Here’: Harry and Ziva are a young couple who live [...]

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Aftermath

Well, today was the day that I had to deal with the car. First thing I needed to do was to get a police report. As soon as the incident happened on Thursday night, I immediately called the police and they told me to report it to the police at the roadblock. The policewoman took [...]

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Motherf*cking Palestinian kids stoned me

About 30 minutes ago I was stoned by Palestinian mini-terrorists while driving home from band practice on the Jerusalem-Modi’in highway, Road 443. Thankfully I am fine, not that shaken up, but rather angry. Angry at myself for trusting that these incidents were behind us. And angry that I didn’t have a gun on me. I [...]

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Bang bang bang bang bang

We moved out of Jerusalem because we couldn’t breathe, the streets were disgusting, it was noisy and it stressed us out to no end. Needless to say I was kind perturbed to read this story in Ha’aretz that says the air quality in my town of Modi’in is now worse that Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. [...]

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Onward Jewish soldiers…

Jewish immigration from America is up and is about to approach a twenty year high. (full story) I’m sure Nefesh b’Nefesh handing out massive sums of cash from Evangelical Christians provided the impetus for many to immigrate. When I made Aliyah back in 97 I was 22, had a couple grand in my pocket, a [...]

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