Hey everyone, it’s Whatever Wednesdays again. This is just going to be a short post about my adventures in “Gardening”.

Gardening?

Yea.

So, if you know me, I’m not really into gardening. I can’t really tell the difference between plants and in general I don’t like maintaining my landscape. For this reason I have gardeners and landscapers to do my maintenance for me.

However, we recently decided to pull out a planter from our front deck. It was too heavy and put too much stress on the underlying supports. It didn’t really add too much to the property either. As such, my contractor and my family decided to rip it out and just kind of flatten out that section.

My contractor said he’d come back once we get rid of all the stuff in the planter to rip it out for us. In other words, the responsibility to rip out the plants in the planter falls on us. Of course, he’s a contractor, not a gardener, so this is understandable.

So then my two choices are to call up my gardener and have them rip it out for me… or just do it myself. Normally, I would pick up the phone and call them to come do it. However, since I don’t know when they’d be able to come, and I want my contractor to get to work ripping out the planter, I decided to just do it myself…

This is me currently:

What happened?

Well, it’s not a huge deal, but I underestimated how much time it would take to pull out these plants. Also, I didn’t have any of the tools required to do it. So I just picked up some a trowel and some work gloves from Longs Drugs and decided to give it the old college try.

Let me tell you, when it comes to plants this is me:

So what did you do?

So the planter has a few plants which were pretty easy to rip out. However, there are 3 pretty big Aloe Vera plants. My mother-in-law planted them a year ago, and they just kind of soaked up the rain and the sun and got huge. They are pretty nice to look at though.

Unfortunately, removing these Aloe Vera plants isn’t very easy because the roots kind of spider web everywhere. Additionally, because there are three of them, they kind of all got tangled together. The roots themselves are pretty tough as well. My poor little trowel got really bent out of shape trying to dig them out. Before I could even do anything, I needed to break off all the Aloe Vera fronds first which took awhile. Then I had to dig up all the roots which was not an easy task.

Finally after an hour and a half I managed to pull them all out and throw them into our green trash can for green waste. If you add to the fact that it’s summer and it’s really hot here in Hawaii, well, yea it was a rough time for me. I was sweating like a pig by the time I was done.

Anyways, long story short, I think it probably took my much longer than someone who knew what they were doing and had the proper tools to do it. This was just another reminder that I should stick to the things I am good at and let the professionals handle things I’m not good at.

TL;DR

Sensei shouldn’t do gardening.

-Sensei

Agree? Disagree? Questions, Comments and Suggestions are welcome.

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