Think Before You Act

Sometimes excitement blinds the mind. That’s what happened to me. I was so excited about my little nopal project that I failed to think it through. The first time it hit me that I did not know what I was doing when I ended up with a truck bed full of nopales to plant. I did not realize at the time that the “handful” of nopales we had cut were 200 plus. Thankfully, my family helped plant them but it was still super manual. The ground had to be manually loosened, each pad had to have its’ own little hole dug and each pad had to be planted individually. It was definitely more work than I had anticipated.

You would think that after that experience I would have learned to think things through. Nope. Instead, I kept getting new pads to plant and using my family to help. Before I knew it, I had over 1,000 plants at which point I realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was then that I began to research everything about nopales.

I learned that there is a desired direction of planting nopales. Unfortunately, I had not minded what direction they were pointing and had mostly done it wrong. I learned that when well maintained the nopal plant can live up to 30-50 years. Well, I guess if my incorrectly planted nopales survived I would live to see them facing the wrong direction for the rest of my life. I learned that there is a certain depth that they need to be planted. Yeah well, since sometimes I was tired the holes for planting the pads were not made too deep. I learned that when cut for planting the nopal should rest a certain amount of time before planting in the ground. That explained why some of the nopales did not take on as quickly as others. There were so many things I learned that if I had just taken the time initially to research I could have saved myself the headache of having to backtrack and try to salvage some of those mistakes. The point is, if you are going to start something make sure you at least know the basics.