can't...plant...transplant...pant...

Friday night, ElGirlo met me at work and we went to the temple. It was the new Rexburg Temple. Very beautiful. On our way, she told me of her plans to transplant 9 trees the next day—3 trees for us and 3 each for two of our neighbors.

I asked ElGirlo if she realized how difficult it would be to transplant those trees. I don’t think she did. At about 11:30 that night, we mapped out where we wanted to put the trees.

We awoke early Saturday morning and began digging in the…well, I can’t say dirt…we began digging in the rocks. Yep. There were many more rocks than dirt. Not fun, as some of the rocks were as big as my head. (And let me tell ya, I have a big head!) Anyway, we dug and dug, but mostly dislodged rocks. Backbreaking work.

One of the neighbors decided they didn’t have time to transplant that day. O.k. The other neighbor asked us to help them dig their 3 holes. We got there in the late afternoon after digging in our yard all day. Happily, their yard had a good layer of topsoil on it, and digging theirs was cake compared to ours.

We finally got out to the house of the nice folks who were giving the trees away at about 4pm. That’s when the real work began. We dug out two big plum trees with humongous root balls. The biggest one was over 10 feet tall! ElGirlo had described it as about 6 feet. I had told her a 6 foot tree might be too big for us. Yeah. That tree was a beast.

The neighbors who were helping us weren’t much help. He was recovering from back surgery, so he couldn’t lift a finger. She worked as hard as she could, but is suffering from several illnesses that make pushing herself too hard very dangerous. She pushed herself too hard. We got a bit worried when she just about passed out.

Thankfully, ElGirlo’s dad came to the rescue. He helped us dig the trees out. Or I should say, we helped him dig the trees out. He was a ball of energy. ElGirlo & I were exhausted from digging all day. Heck, it’s Thursday and I’m still exhausted! Father-in-Law really saved our aching bums. Our tree was so heavy we had to pull it out with his engine jack.

Back at home, we got the tree off the trailer by wrapping a tow rope around the root ball and pulling with a truck. Heavy.

We only ended up getting 2 trees, one for us, one for the neighbors. We figured we didn’t have the strength to get any more.

ElGirlo plans to go back today. I don’t know if she will or not.
Me? I gotta go to work. Yippee!