Accessible Gardening: #20 Practical Matters for Physically Challenged Gardeners, 3 by Agavegirl1

Agavegirl1 wrote:
Good Morning Gang :D
Hope everyone is well. Ahhh....words. I usually don't try to stump or outdo anyone. I just love to share those I know and have fun sharing them with others. I think I told you about that nightmare English professor I had for all my classes in college. Gandhi would have strangled the man. I swear he took his impotency and frustration as an unpublished writer (aside from his PH.D.) out on his students.
I got such wonderful comments on my papers. Papers were required to be all hand written of course because he would never accept them typed until THE final draft and corrections were made to his satisfaction. If he couldn't read your writing it then it was wrong..and late because you had to rewrite it and turn it in the next day! If it was misspelled then it was wrong. A comma out of place it was wrong. A comma instead of a semi colon...it was wrong.
I got comments like: poor word choice; inane; trite and meaningless filler; 'What is this?' (yep, actually wrote that in brackets around 4 paragraphs); "Why is this here?"; "Do you own a dictionary?" (Now remember we didn't have spell check on our computers and these papers were being hand written per his request.)
One of my all time favorites was nothing but a big red " ? " across a whole page I wrote. WHAAAAAT???? Tellllll me WHAT YOU WANT before I killllll you! What the %#@# does " ? " mean?
There were some other goodies too like: random use of punctuation, superfluous commas, unnecessary, redundant, repetitive, monotonous, oh and the ever so kind, "Your paper reads like a palindrome". KIILLLLLLLL!!! Then he'd go..."It's not so bad. If you cared you could get an A on it. As it stands, at best this is a B paper and that's being generous. Just rewrite it."

PALINDROME: A word, verse, or sentence that reads the same forward as it does backwards. (madam; Hannah; LOL)

At times I actually feel myself tense up when I have to write something on paper. Talk about shell shock.

Who/whom, he/him and a few others give me trouble. My latest has been trying to focus on when to use "my self" versus "myself" correctly. It was pointed out to me in a letter I wrote to an editor at a newspaper that I used the wrong form. Can we say, "cringe...red face?" Case nominative, possessive and objective pronouns always drove me nuts. (*grimace*)

Mushroom compost. Interesting. I am not real familiar with it. Most likely it is because I live in a desert and deal primarily with things that take cactus/citrus/palm planting mix. Regular house plants I just grab a bag of Miracle Grow potting soil. Mushroom compost sounds intriguing if it works and produces big plants. I'm all for it. Do they have anything that makes cacti grow faster?

Speaking of cacti I'm sooooo tired. The soil in my back yard is hateful. The former owners put down a double layer of mesh to keep the weeds from coming up then put the landscape rock over that. For months now I couldn't figure out why my plants looked so sickly back there or were about half the size of what was out front. It never dawned on me the soil was sour. It had not been aerated and the mesh was trapping moisture between it, the ground, and the plants causing root rot and yellowing.

Me being me spent an entire day digging up every single last plant in the back yard and bringing it to the front. I then moved a lot of the things in the front yard to make space for them. This required digging new holes and more holes. See you just can't plop cacti anywhere. Some need more sun than others, some need heat but not sun, some like shade, etc. So I basically rearranged my whole front yard and dug new holes for some other things.

I only have some Aloes in the ground and a pine cone cactus left to move. Two Agaves are in pots on the patio which is fine. I am soooo tired and sore. I worked from early morning until 5:30p.m. Quite sunburnt too although I had a hat on. I had a V-neck shirt on and so the whole front area got burnt too. Thank goodness it wasn't low cut! Did no gardening yesterday. Sore and tired and rather dehydrated

Finally colored my hair yesterday. :D YIPPEE no more gray roots. Well...couldn't do it with staples in my head and while I had a scab there (Ewwww). Yesterday had to go look in on the old neighbor's cat in our former neighborhood. That was a bit of a drive. Today I have something I got to take care this afternoon and I need to get the house cleaned up. So it looks like tomorrow I'll finish the last of the gardening.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with the back yard! Raised beds. Then it doesn't matter what the soil is like because I'm the one putting in the fresh, appropriate soil. Bets, I'm with you on doing a little at a time as one can affords. I'll be doing that with brick and stock piling it until I have enough to build the beds I want.

This Agave's work is never done. Time to go flip laundry and do dishes.

Pic #1: front yard left view
Pic #2 front yard center/left view
Pic #3 Agaves around tree (not all)
Pic #4 Bubble garden on left and front yard. This is the walk when you come out my front door.
Pic #4 far left view of yard.

Now these plants are currently small BUT keep in mind that pole cacti, Agaves and prickly pear do grow fast. In two years there won't be room to move around or very little room out there between those plants!