Share the pain of a gardening 'incident'

[SleepyHedgehog]

Any disasters that only really get the right reaction from another gardener welcome!

Mine is this:
I have been mooching thinning out unwanted plants, DH merrily managing his composting zone in the background. I made a separate pile for the horsetail to be burned/banished from the premises, been doing this for a few years and it's manageable currently but have to keep an eye out.
Me 'DH where's the separate pile gone?'
DH 'Oh I've shredded everything for you and turned the compost heap'. *horror movie music plays

Oh
My
God

DH and his mate picked the entire passionfruit crop before they were ripe. Passionfruit only ripen on the vine. I still don't understand why they did it.

df shredded some twigs after a round of cuttings.
dutifully wore safety goggles and leather gloves.
but shorts.

a stray piece of wood shot out and through his lower leg. straight through between tibia and fibula. very lucky not to hit the bones directly. bonfires instead of shredding since then.

Oooh I wouldn't want to be in your husbands shoes!
My dh is a bloody nightmare with pruning everything within an inch of its life. I'm much more conservative, unless it's a tough plant which needs a good hacking, but dh has killed so many of my lovely plants, he's now band from that particular job (we're polar opposite with gardening, I like slightly wild, untamed rambling plants and shrubs which all bloom and are fragrant, sort of cottage garden, with ponds and lots of wildlife...dh on the other hand likes everything to be manicured to within an inch of its life, and all very orderly, he's desperate to get rid of my various ponds....the philistine).

Ds's first time helping at the allotment.. Stood on a rake.

Was a comedy moment until he cried...

Late May, looking out from the sink, seeing the rambling rose looking a bit bigger than usual, but it's going to be a magnificent display come 3rd June (a very special/emotionally loaded birthday on which that rambler has flowered without fail every year) as it was loaded with lovely fat clusters of buds. DP says 'That plant's getting a bit big'. 'Yeah, I'll go out there after it's flowered and tidy it up a bit, it's going to be the best I've ever seen, since I trained it horizontally last winter - and the scent it gives off is amazing, it'll be full of bees, I've even seen leafcutters use the petals to make their nest tubes all pink instead of green'.

6 days later, come in from work, make a cuppa, wander over to the sink and see - nothing except for the main stems sawn through, leaving just one non flowering, spindly bit.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MY ROSE?

<run out to the garden>

'Hey, didn't realise you were back, I've sorted out that plant for you, it'll look much neater out here now'

<crying for at least half an hour, still moved to tears years later at the pain of my precious rose being murdered>

Oh no!

Omg. A case for divorce if ever I heard one.

I was always taught by my parents never to leave a rake tines up because of exactly this, but never seen it happen!

My father did this to my mother's beautiful, old rosebush, just before it came into full bloom, just out of the blue, and told her about it proudly when she came home from work. To this day he has absolutely no sense of what he did wrong.

To him plants are either 'tidy' or 'not tidy', and she was being 'fussy'.

My parents also had a row of mature trees, not very tall, down the side of their long garden, and when a housing estate was built close up against their boundary, the trees were all that made their garden not be overlooked by eight houses at right angles to theirs. My father got a ladder and a saw and chopped all the branches down to the trunks, so the new neighbours wouldn't be discommoded by 'mess and leaves', and was completely baffled when the new people were horrified, because now all they could see from their back windows and gardens was these lumpy, bare trunks, and they'd lost all their privacy. And then he got cross they were cross!.

DH likes to do a bit of weeding from time to time. He "weeded" all my broad bean seedlings ☹️.

I suppose I ought to be grateful that DH doesn’t do anything in the garden at all except mow the lawn. Otherwise the rest of it might as well not exist and it’s all mine to deal with. It’s a fairly big garden and tbh I do wish he’d acknowledge its existence (other than the relatively small bit that’s lawn) sometimes!

Stories like these are EXACTLY why me & my partner have our own sections of our garden. Neither of us would dare touch the other's plants!

So many times. We had an overgrown potentilla that had been strangled by honeysuckle. I asked DH to dig out the potentilla but leave some of the honeysuckle which was rooted behind it so I could train it up the fence. Came home to zero honeysuckle and a terrible looking (because it had been buried in the honeysuckle) but still huge potentilla.

Trained a clematis up my shed. Out of season DH thought it was dead and cut it all down and removed it.

We had some beautiful aquilegia self seed on the edge of the lawn. DH lawn mowered them down at the peak of their flowering.

He is now only allowed to garden under supervision.

OMG OP, i think I’d put DH through the shredder!

My MIL who isn’t a gardener but likes to be helpful cut all my herbs down thinking they were weeds…anytime she heads for the garden now one of the kids will shout watch out granny is in the garden!

was always taught by my parents never to leave a rake tines up because of exactly this, but never seen it happen!

Mind you, it's possible to bash yourself on a tines down rake if you're really stupid unlucky😬

Absolutely Meredint I received the same training. It's so engrained in me, not putting the tines downwards causes a visceral reaction in me.

There is a shrub that grows along the front of the raised terrace wall so the foliage came up higher than the terrace wall, so basically a hedge showing above the wall. It just needed a trim. Why DH decided to trim a step into one end of the shrub, instead of trimming it all straight across so it sat neatly, all one level above the wall, is beyond me. It’s been 6 years and it still looks awful despite my best efforts to level it up.
He also trimmed a lovely flowering shrub down to half its size and made it into a cube. The bees loved the flowers. It has now almost reached the height it was when he butchered it and has just had the most amazing flowers for the first time in those 6 years.

I visited a well-known garden near us and was blown away by the beautiful wedding cake trees. The had a plant shop so I forked out a fortune for one of their seedlings and proudly planted it on the edge of the lawn. Two weeks later DH went over it with the ride on mower. 😡

Yesterday dropped a block of wood on my tomato plant. Cue slow mo horror movie music as I watched it smash the main stalk to pieces. I cried😅

I credit the writers of The Simpsons with any reduction in rake-related injuries since 1993, as that represents four generations - X, Millennials, Zoomers and now Alpha that have grown up knowing what will inevitably happen.

Sideshow Bob, we thank you.

Did it ever grow back at all?

My gardener, from a modest distance -"this rose has gone wild, shall I remove it?"
Me, looking at climbing rose over pergola "oh yes I don't love it that's fine"

I go back indoors.

A few days later I wander outside, where is my fucking favourite gorgeous rose, have I gone mad, where is it?

Gardener has just bloody green-binned it. Arrrrgh

Not in any real sense. I had a few flowers the following year and then it was gone. I think it was just too much for the poor thing with disease and next to zero photosynthesis happening.

Put my back out pulling a single strand of bindweed, I was crouched down and barely moved my hand when I felt something go.

Horribly painful, took me 20 minutes to get up to the house.

Had several expensive visits to physio and off work for four days as could barely walk.

I am very, very careful in the garden these days, definitely don't want a repeat of that experience.🙁