I went on a dump run with Carol yesterday. She had some big metal scraps to get rid of. I had a pickup truck. And how could I pass up visit to the mythical paradise of the Baltimore County Dump? It’s glorious! I took some stuff too. Most notably, I decided to get rid of my cholla cactus.
Since I only have one reference to it in the memory archive, I don’t know how many years I’ve been growing this cactus. I drove it here from Nebraska. When was the last time I drove to Nebraska? 2005? The cholla at Finke Nursery in Lincoln is breathtaking when it blooms. I wanted that in my garden. But I never got it. Meanwhile, the plant got larger and grew more spines – more wicked, barbed spines. I decided to get rid of it before it became any more of a monster.
I had to cut it into pieces to get it bagged. I used my big pruners so I could stay far away from the spines. I also had pliers for pulling spines out when I got stuck.
Here’s a before and after. And now I have a blank spot for new plant. How exciting!
BEFORE
AFTER
Ahhhhh!!!! Your hand!!!!!!! That looks so painful!
So, if you took Carol along every time, could you use the Baltimore dump as your own? How do they know if you are a resident or not? Did Carol have to show some ID or do some secret handshake? I bet it’s iris scanning, isn’t it?
The spines are barbed, so they only come out with a strong, skin-pulling tug. They do hurt, but mostly they give me the jibblies because they’re so vicious.
Carol did have to show ID, otherwise I’d go to the County dump every time. Everyone was so polite, and there were no secret rules and you throw all your trash down off of a wall instead of up into a bin. So much easier…
This was the first time anyone had asked to see my ID (and as fast as he glanced at my MD driver’s license, I can’t imagine he verified anything of significance anyway), but that made me feel more useful than previous visits, frankly. The secret handshake might be more fun, except that knowing what we were tossing out, and smelling the odiferous boquet that is known universally as The Dump, I doubt there’d be enough hand sanitizer on the planet for folks to be comfortable actually touching their hands with the workers there. Ick.
God bless friends with open bed trucks who love to make runs to the dump! Amen. I owe ya’…
Isn’t the cholla cactus the one that the spines will keep working their way in until they hit bone? And they can propagate from a very small piece, I think. So if a bunny gets some spines, it runs until the spines kill it, and a new cholla forest is born. Talk about jibblies!