3-10-2008 Pygmy Horriblis
We bought a massive pygmy date palm for a price we couldn't refuse. But the full price had not yet been paid.
Pygmy Date palm loaded onto friend's truck. Sites like this are pretty common, though, in Florida,
We still had to install it. When something is this big, it's not really "planting". Initially, I really didn't want to have anything to do with bringing it home. I was more than happy paying whatever it cost to have people with big machines haul it to our home and drop it in the ground. This probably would have ended up costing more than the palm itself, which was from Home Depot, cheap, and on sale at that. So we decided to attempt a manual self-installation.
Loading the palm onto the truck (manual shifting which mostly came right back to me after a 10 year space off time) was a breeze gracias al forklift. The fun ended there.
So, Sonia got some neighbors/friends together, and the four of us started sliding the the pallet off the truck, with the palm on top. The weight quickly overwhelmed us, as I half expected and the palm started sliding off the pallet, almost crushing my neighbor from across the street Mark's foot.
I heard him say. "My foot, my foot, foot, foot, foot. Still my foot." So we pulled the pallet away from his foot, which resulted in numerous thorn cuts on our arms and even Brian's, another neighbor's, ear and the top of his head. In fact, my ear was impaled by the sharp thorns as well, a fact I noticed the next day. Sonia devilishly snickered at our cartoon-like ouches.
Ed, a friend who lives a couple miles away looked like a character from the movie Stigmata, as his wrist and work-gloved hands were impaled so many times he had to go wash up. The needles effortlessly puncture standard work gloves.
Finally, after much labor, we rolled the palm into the pre-dug hole and finished the installation. For $100, we could have paid someone to do it. They probably would have been eviscerated as well, but that would be their occupational hazard and choice. Also, they might actually employ some modern simple machines, or even a Bobcat.
- Planted in March 2008
The next day, we check on Mark and his foot hadn't even bruised, and we gave him some chocolate and beer to partially compensate for the trauma and to say thanks for volunteering without even being asked.
Morale: plant from seeds. Impatient people (not naming any names here) are dangerous!
