Gardening Woes

  I'm not an avid gardener. I have a green thumb, but I'm very sensitive to the sun, and the migraines make it hard to spend enough time outdoors to really care for delicate plants. However, that hasn't stopped me from nursing several rose bushes back to life after they were almost completely cut down by the gardeners (there's a difference between trimming and relentlessly whacking a bush to death). I've planted, grown, and tended six lemon trees--five are healthy and the sixth is clinging to life with everything it has. The poor thing has always been smaller than the others. It was a late bloomer (haha), and had all its leaves destroyed by some pest when it was less than six inches tall. It's still valiantly striving to grow, though.

  I have also have a couple of tiny pine trees I got for free one Christmas from the tree place that was trying to get rid of them, which are now a lot taller than they were; several containers of various flowers; pots of herbs; and catnip--which is an herb, but not one humans eat.

I've been wondering why the catnip was only growing along the edge of the pot.
I finally caught the culprit red-pawed! And he shows not an ounce of guilt.

  A day or two ago, there was a strong wind. I didn't think anything of it until I went into the back yard this morning (now yesterday morning). The final pine tree that needed to be re-potted from its small pot to a larger one was over on its side. I went to pick it up, and about a quarter of the pot came off in my hand.

You can't see it, but there are a lot of cracks in the pot.

  Cue a surprise trip to Home Depot. I left at about 9:30 AM and shopped for a couple of hours. I know, I know. I went to get one pot for the poor tree. Then I realized I should pick up pots for the lemon trees, and a gift for my parents' anniversary, and a pot for that. And I needed more potting soil to add to the new pots. Not to mention gardening gloves. I usually prefer to do my gardening barehanded so I can feel the soil. Unfortunately, my thumb nail tore off two days ago, so the area at the end of my thumb is basically an open wound. And since I like to feel the soil, all of my work gloves are too thick to use as gardening gloves. Luckily I found a set at Home Depot which is thinner (not such a good thing when dealing with pine trees, but the backs are thick, so that's a good trade-off) and which have the pointer and middle fingers of both hands as touchscreen compatible! I sneered a bit at that when I bought them, and promptly found myself using the touchscreen fingers to switch my music selections while gardening.

I should have taken the picture before using the gloves.
Oh well! Furious digging, and only slightly stained.

  Yes, I am a cyborg. I was plugged in to music from my phone using Spotify and my Bluetooth headphones. I love those headphones. They're great for music if you're out and about--you can hear through the headphones so you aren't ever caught by surprise, but at the same time, the music quality is superb. I'm no audiophile, though. And the phone function of the headset isn't great. If you're in a building, in the car, or some other location with very little background noise, they work fine. If you're outside, everything from the wind to screaming children down the street is picked up by the microphone.

  But back to Home Depot! I was a bit embarrassed during the trip. I'd parked in front of the tool rental--habit--and the garden center is on the opposite side. I left with so much stuff that the cashier asked me if I wanted someone to help me load it all. Normally I would say no. I was flustered and said yes. The poor guy insisted on pushing the cart, and then we had to hike all the way across the parking lot. Then my trunk was full of stuff since this was an unexpected trip. He managed to stuff the two containers of potting soil into the trunk. Then I had to back my car out so he could stuff six giant pots into my back seat. I took the gift for my parents (hint: It smells divine and is very angry. I have the puncture marks to prove it) and put it in my front seat. Usually I buckle things like the pots and the plant in just in case (and electronics, too. My computers and monitors will never be cited for not wearing a seat belt), but I was so scatter-brained from everything that I forgot. It didn't help that it wasn't until the guy was leaving that I realized I was probably supposed to tip him. Then there was a guy with a cart who stopped to let me back out the rest of the way, and an impatient van a couple of cars down and across the aisle who was trying to pull out and who was very upset at the guy waiting for me to pull out. So I floored it out of there, hoping that no one noticed how weird everything was.

  Everything was going fine, until I realized that my GPS--yes, I have horrible direction sense, and I use a GPS to go everywhere (more evidence that I'm a cyborg)--was telling me I had to make a U-turn, I was in the right lane, and there were three lanes to get across before I could make the turn. I dove across the lanes (I was safe, no one else was around behind me! What kind of crazy person do you take me for?), zipped into the turn lane, saw it was green and that no one was close enough to impede a safe U-turn, and zoomed around the turn, and despite a more than safe distance between me and the upcoming car, I panicked a little and floored it through the turn so he wouldn't slam into me (I affectionately call my car Betsy, because she's more of a cow than a horse. Flooring it in Betsy is like going normal speed for everyone else). One set of pots promptly fell over against the other set of pots, and the plant-gift tried to take a nosedive onto my floorboard. Nooooooo!

  At the next red light, I managed to belt in the Very Angry Plant (and yes, I did apologize to it for squishing its leaves), but I couldn't do a thing about the pots, which continued to slide around no matter how carefully I drove the rest of the way home. Well, at least until the second set of pots wedged themselves against my seat and the first set of pots, and kept everything steady. Painful for my back, but steady.

  Getting the stuff into the back yard was a trick. I had 80 pounds of potting soil (3 cubic feet. I looked up the weight of a bag of 1.5 cubic feet of potting soil. 40 pounds, apparently), approximately 80 pounds of pots, a Very Angry Plant, gloves, starter pots, a packet of seeds, a trowel, and a potting trowel (because I left mine out one rainy night, and they turned into piles of rust). By now, it was lunchtime. I counted and calculated, and the distance between my car and the spot in the back yard where I dumped all the gardening equipment was 48 yards. 48 yards x 5 trips back and forth. No wonder my body hates me. On the plus side, I easily hit my 10k step goal today. My Fitbit was very happy with me. Cyborg, I tell you. Cyborg!

  Back on the minus side, it was lunchtime. I grabbed a quick meal, then I re-potted the pine that was in the broken pot. That wasn't so bad, except that pines have a vendetta against me, and it was horribly painful when it stabbed me all up and down my arms. All right, you caught me. It wasn't horribly painful, but it was terribly uncomfortable. With the rescue tree in its new home, I turned to the biggest pine. I'd planted it in a very large container of a lovely umber color.

(image)

  Unfortunately the pines are going to need larger pots--they'll grow to something like six feet tall, and the pot it was in is shaped in such a way that it wouldn't be easy to remove the tree to re-pot it when necessary. Since the tree had only been in the pot for a few months at most, I decided that now was the ideal time to switch pots. After all, I'd just purchased a brand new pot for it!

  It gets worse. As I was digging away at the soil in the pot, moving it to an empty pot for storage while avoiding the vicious needles (apparently I only like Very Angry Plants), I discovered that the pot had a bad case of white grubs. What specific type, I don't know. They all tend to be the offspring of scarab beetles, but I wouldn't know which scarab beetle produced these grubs if you offered me a billion dollars. If you decide to watch the video, I highly suggest turning  your volume very low. My phone's microphone picks up everything, and I didn't bother editing the video at all.

  I've covered the grubs in soil since I took this video, as I'm curious what they'll turn out to be. I'll cover the top with some mesh so I can get a look before the adult beetles fly off.

  The entire ordeal took all day. By the time I was done with Home Depot, lunch, and re-potting, it was about 6 PM. Most of my gardening was done during the hottest part of the day, because that's the smart thing to do, right? Go outside without sunscreen or shade, and tough it out. RAWR, me Anonymous Cyborg, me strong like rock!

  Phew! I think that just about covers my less-than-stellar day. To finish, let me leave you a picture of my arm after I finished wrestling with the pine trees.

The red bloody mark is due to a vampi--er, I mean a phlebotomist.
The red rashy look is entirely tree related.
I usually have rather pale arms with a slight greenish tint thanks to the very visible vein along the underside of my arm.