TheBanyanTree: Wherein peter falls down a hole

[Mike Pingleton]

All's well that ends well?

My mother would have called that 'a layover to catch meddlers'.  A favorite
phrase of hers in my childhood, which I didn't understand, which probably
was her intention.

Mike





On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 10:38 PM peter macinnis <petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au>
wrote:

> I have been gardening this past week, subduing a wild jungle of trees
> and weeds, and today's task was to trim the dead fronds on a  Canary
> Island palm in the garden. I grew up in a street lined with these, and I
> know that they have vicious spines, but I also know how to deal with
> them. I cut the fronds with loppers, and then chopped off the end 60 cm
> or 2 feet so all the spines are now in a bin. Later, I will cut off the
> leaves from the stalks and compost them
>
> For some time, there has been a deep depression in the garden near the
> palm, about a metre, three feet deep, and I have recently been filling
> it with all the fallen leaves, converting it into a compost pit.  Today,
> as I was trimming the dead fronds on that palm, I stepped onto/into the
> depression a couple of times, and the third time I did, the bottom of
> the hole gave way, and my leg plunged in.  Clearly, the leaves had been
> plugging the hole in an unsupported way.
>
> It was a bit like stepping into really deep snow as I did once in
> Norway, so I knew what to do: bend the knee and drop back to land on the
> thigh, so I only go knee-deep, and then scramble out. When I got out and
> started poking palm fronds in there, some of them went down to a depth
> of 3 metres, ten feet.
>
> It could have been nasty, but it wasn't. Just curious, because the
> geology here doesn't support sink holes.
>
> Enquiries have been set in train, but I have ruled out white rabbits.
>
> peter
>
>
>