I decided to clean up the glasshouse at my parent's place today which had started to look like a scene out of Jurassic Park...It had become quite overgrown (not by weeds but, strangely, by ferns).
Moving the plants around to get at the unwanted ferns was not as easy as I thought...one of the plants, a whopper of a Sydney rock orchid, must have weighed more than a hundred kilos (the fact that it was sitting inside a heavy terracotta pot didn't help with the lifting).
After I was done removing as much of the unwanted ferns as I possibly could, I decided that some of the orchids needed repotting.
Repotting an orchid - as anyone with the experience would attest - is not for the faint-hearted. Apart from the ocassional centipede, slug and spider (the latter seems to freak me out in ways like no other creature I have ever encountered as a biologist), repotting a (large) orchid is, to put it simply, bloody hard work (I now know why Don Burke recommends an axe). My three hours of potting felt like an intense work out at the gym....there was a lot of lifting, grunting, arm flexing, profuse sweating and tears (I very nearly threw up). By the end of it all, I was absolutely exhausted.
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