S- The weather finally broke for good last week so we geared up to move a special client’s really old, really big and ahem priceless sago palms from one location in her garden to another. We’d been wrestling with the decision to move them since last march and once we had planted the whole garden and let it settle in this summer, all of us saw that we had to bite the bullet and just do it.
So after much strategification we took the majority of the crew- minus Chucho and Polo (eek!)- to the site for the day. To protect the roots, we decided to pull them out all together with a sky track. We hand dug to expose the root system, trussed them together, guided the forks onto the loops and gave it a few gentle tugs. And nada- only one was even barely budging.
An executive decision made by Justin, the surgeon, to see if they would mind coming out one by one. The guys carefully trussed up the second biggest one and JT got 6 individual people giving advice to wiggle, lift, no! forward, back, stop!!, down- wait readjust the straps, don’t wiggle just jiggle… and then all of the sudden she just popped out of the ground with the tiny little root ball you would have imagined but I mean??? We were all so surprised we shouted like 5 year olds and Ben the new guy confessed he was so excited he peed in his pants a little.
We wrassled the biggest one out next – she was a nail biter- and the little one came out like buttah.
Jules couldn’t wait to go tell Chucho and Hippo his usual crew (pictured below w our new logo wear this fall) that it only took 6 of us 7 hours to do what chucho could have done barehanded in 3. That’s a joke- mostly right?!
We moved them to the front, placed them just right, watered them in, shut their sprinkler heads off for the rest of the winter and they look like nothing happened to them. Now we can just wait until next spring to see how much stress it really was on them. Buena suerta. xoxojb