Succulents Suck!

Over the weekend Ginny and I constructed the gigantic cactus bed we have been talking about for weeks.

Sometime somewhere over the 38 years of our marriage, we may have had a dumber idea but, if so, I don’t remember what it was.

Things is, in the years we have lived in this house, we have accumulated various succulents in our yard. We dutifully put these cactus, firecracker aloe, prickly pear, aguavay, pointy things I don’t know the name of, and a giant century plant in various nooks and crannies of the yard where they snag our ankles as we do yard work.

We thought it would be a fine idea to get all these plants into a single bed where we will never have to touch one again.

Sounds smart — but it isn’t.

We bought lumber to make a cactus corral eight inches high, by ten feet wide, by twelve feet long. That’s 8X10X12 (I’d put in the little “ or ‘ marks to show feet and inches but I can’t remember if “ is feet and ‘ is inches or vice versa).

I cut sod squares from the defined area and re-planted those squares in spots here and there where the lawn looked thin. We dug out weeds. We chopped roots. We tilled the soil. We hauled fill and shoveled dirt to raise the level of the bed providing good drainage for the plants.

The temperature pushed a hundred degrees and cactus-like plants like full sun with no shade so that’s where we put the bed.

We started work at 6:30 a.m. before the heat got too bad, wore straw hats, took frequent breaks and drank lots of water. During our breaks we discussed aspects of our prayer life. (Isn’t there some Scripture or hymn somewhere with the line “Nor Thorns Infest The Ground”?) Even with our taking such frequent breaks, nevertheless, the task proved grueling.

Time came to plant the cactus things.

Took us seven hours to un-pot (root-bound suckers!) and re-plant the various cactus.

We took seven hours to plant the bed; then it took an hour and 40 minutes for me to pluck thorns out of Ginny’s hands (She had worked with the Prickly Pears while I dug out some heaver succulents).

And yes, she did wear gardening gloves.

Don’t tell the Iraqis, not a whisper now, but the thorns of a Florida Prickly Pear can pierce Kevlar!

I had to go over each of her fingers separately with a lighted magnifying glass and three different kinds of tweezers — tools left over from my model shipbuilding days — plucking thorns.

Now it’s great we had the model-building tools on hand, but because of the unaccustomed physical labor of digging out the bed and our general decrepit old-age, both of us have shaky hands. And my dimming eyesight led me to have to feel for the hair-thin thorns, and there were hundreds of them.

Ginny hardly ever screamed.

Florida Indians used to eat Prickly Pears. They dug the plant up by the roots, threw it whole on the fire to burn all the thorns off, then roasted the fruit and flesh.

If we ever have to transplant another cactus, I’m borrowing a flame thrower!

Anyhow, we got the massive job done. We survived the thorns. We enjoy the result (I’ll post photos when the cactus bloom). And we enjoyed working together.

Thanks be to God.

But with all that rooting and digging and lifting and bending and carrying and planting — today, if my dick were to get half as stiff as the rest of me, life would be perfect and the Viagra company would go bankrupt.