What was I thinking… I ain’t particularly blessed with green fingers, but that didn’t really hold me back when taking on the massive, but beautiful, plant from the front garden. For months already, the big plant falls over every time it’s a bit windy. The reed basket it’s standing in ain’t heavy enough to keep it up straight. But today was the day I was going to fix that. My enthusiasm had no limits. The wind would never move this plant again! I had the plan all worked out. To start with I borrowed a big bag of unused small gravel from the local government. This would make a solid foundation in the reed basket.
After getting that I went to the local flower store to get some fertilized garden sand. Well some… 20 kilo’s proved to be more then enough! :-) An unbelievable cheap 20 kilo’s by the way!! 20 kilo’s for only 1,50 euro! Amazing… So I had the foundation, got the fresh sand, now it was time to get the plant! Everything was flying and my enthusiasm was still sky high! Nothing was gonna stop me! :-)

Besides the big beautiful plant there was also a small weird looking green plant in the reed basket. Part of the operation was also to remove that one, once and for all. It all started out quite well. I lifted the big plant simply from the basket and it was out in no time. But then the first problem occurred… There was hardly any sand in the basket, it was all and only roots of the big plant! Just one big chunk of roots! Well, a couple of roots wasn’t gonna stop me at this point, so with a little bit of force the roots gave way and I was well on my way to remove the small green plant. A big pull and… Success! Green plant was history. Now it was just me and the big plant. And almost right away the first doubts came into my mind… how do I get this big thing back into the basket?!?! Not really helping at this point was the fact that the big plant looked quite dead for the first 20 centimeters… You didn’t really noticed that when the whole thing was still together, as all that was nicely covered up… But at this point, with the plant all shattered around the ground, it looked terrible! I knew there was some dead pieces, but simple thought I would cut them away… that would make the plant look better and give it some more room to breath and get sunshine. Little did I know this was all over the plant…
Then the world started to fall down on me quite quickly… I had made the worst possible judgment ever… I could never put this plant back together again! It would look so horrible. Quick thinking brought me the idea to go back to the flower store, see if they had the same plant, buy 4 and put them into the basket! :-)
Unfortunately the plant was nowhere to be found. Disappointment was all over the place at this moment. As I was out of options, I decided to give the big plant a second try. I cut off all branches about 5 centimeter from the ground, leaving me with a couple of chunks of small branches with the main roots. Got the 4 biggest ones together and returned to the original plan. Gravel in the basket, fresh sand on it and then the chopped up 4 pieces that were left of the once beautiful big plant. The only positive conclusion I could draw at this point was that at least the plant would never ever be blown over by the wind again! The basket now weighed a ton! :-)

Sadly enough I took a “before” picture this morning, before I started going wild. With the great intention to make the “after” picture when I was done, and to see the big plant standing in the middle of the front garden, as proud as the guy who put it there! ;-) Little did I know it was going to end up like this… I feel great shame by still putting the pictures on the blog, but let it be a warning to all of you, to never invite me when you need some help in your garden! :-)

Before :-)	After :-(

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005 at 19:02 and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.