We wanted to share a very important story with you all, and we hope it can shed some light on the hidden dangers of using soils, mainly bagged composted potting soils.
We love our container planting and it serves us well, and we just love bringing plentiful bounties to the table. Moreover, there are lots of benefits of gardening for mind and body.
We changed our large greenhouse around this year, purchasing ten recycled 32-pound containers. As we didn’t have the amount of soil needed to fill them from the compost bin, we purchased ten high-grade quality potting bags of soil. The bags contained 30 pounds of soil, which was perfect for the job. We’re not going into brand names as we feel there is nothing gained by doing so.
We were very eager to get the containers filled with the soil, so with much effort not trying to lift the heavy bags of soil, we filled up the containers at a much slower rate as we have recently open-heart surgery.
The next bit of the story is quite alarming. After a few days of filling up the new containers inside the greenhouse, we began feeling very ill. It started with the worst sore throat we’ve ever had, really bad headaches, sore muscles, and a really bad stiff neck.
We had a very high fever and coupled up with the pain from heart surgery only weeks ago, we were thinking,
“Beam Me Up, Scotty.” Give me a magic pill!
We took a trip to the local doctors clinic. When the doctor looked at us, she saw that we were coughing uncontrollably. She asked if we had travelled overseas recently, and we hadn’t. She asked what we had been doing in the last week, and we replied, only been filling up containers with soil. We were lucky that the lights went on in the doctors head, and she put it together very quickly, that we had most likely inhaled some spores from the bagged potting mix and we had developed “Legionnaire’s disease”. She said we were presenting all the classic symptoms, so she prescribed a certain type of anti-biotic, and seven days later we’re still around to tell the story.
The medication quickly got us well again and we are back recovering again from my surgery. “Yippee.”
We’re counting our blessings that we came across a very good doctor, this could have been easily missed and we would have died and would now planting daisies somewhere.
You hear people dying from unnamed viruses all the time, and we’re now thinking it might have been avoided?
The bottom line is here, that if you love your gardening take some insurances when you work with composted soils.
USE a MASK, and WEAR some CHEAP GARDEN GLOVES.
We’re sure your garden will still be around ten years from now, you just need to take some inexpensive moves to insure you are, too?
Happy Gardening to all, and Take Care.