Gardening After Hip Replacement

My Personal Experience With Hip Replacement

This entire post is my personal experience with hip replacement surgery and afterwards. I have been an avid gardener for over 30 years and I love every bit of it. My own backyard is my personal paradise. I can spend hours working outside in my yard. It is my own labor of love. I enjoy every minute of it, even when the temperature is in the upper 90s. So, my first thought after I heard that I had to have hip replacement surgery was, “how am I going to work in my garden?” This is my story on gardening after hip replacement.

How It Began

I am fairly young when you think of someone that needs a hip replacement- I am only 51 years old. However, I was born with hip dysplasia. I know, it sounds like something only dogs get. My hips formed incorrectly while I was in the womb. The doctors tried to correct it when I was a baby and a young toddler. Yet, it caught up with me over the last 10 years.

I ended up developing severe arthritis in my left hip. At the time of needing surgery I was bone on bone. I dealt with the arthritis, for the most part, these past few years until one day in early August I had pain that quickly got so bad that I asked my husband to drive me to the emergency room. He knew I was in serious pain since I have never been to the emergency room in the entire 32 years that we have been together. It turned out that I had 4 cysts lined on the pelvis bone where my arthritic hip was. One of the cysts ruptured causing it to feel like I fractured my pelvis.

After my night in the ER and a follow-up with a great Orthopedic surgeon it was determined that it was time to have hip replacement surgery. I knew I was going to need to get the surgery at some point but I wasn’t sure if I was ready for it. I had no choice. So, I started doing as much prep work as I could before I had surgery. This included looking at what I needed to do to my garden/yard before I was going to be out of commission for multiple weeks. Surgery was scheduled for August 28th. I had 22 days to prep my house and yard.

Garden Work Before Surgery

Gardening before my hip replacement was not as active as I wanted it to be. This was partially due to the extreme heat we had. Since we had 45 days of temperatures over 100 degrees I was trying to do whatever I could just to keep my plants alive. Additionally, we were not getting any summer showers like we normally do. I did not lose too many plants but my lawn was pretty bad. I was trying to keep the plants and trees alive for the pollinators, small animals, and the birds. Keeping plants watered was my main concern. When the temperature gets that hot during the day and remains warm at night, which is what happened this past summer, the plants do very little growing.

I do mulch regularly to make sure that the plants get as much help keeping their roots moist during the summer, however, with temps that high I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. As I got closer to the surgery date I was concerned as to how I was going to water. My husband was a huge help and did water some for me- thank you Jeff.

Surgery and Recovery

My surgery was successful. I began doing my exercises the day after my surgery. I was not a fan of doing them at first. And I was so afraid that I was going to mess up my hip after the surgery. My biggest fear was dislocation. My doctor told me that I needed to walk as much as possible. The more I did the exercises the better movement I felt and the less stiffness I had. My leg was so weak since I haven’t used it like normal in several years. When I needed to lift my leg I would use my hands to lift it. I am still trying to break that habit. This recovery time was hard for me.

Post Surgery

I didn’t go outside for around 1 1/2-2 weeks. I did worry about the garden and yard being watered and it didn’t rain at all during that time. The temperature was still over 100 and miserable. The most difficult thing that I dealt with the entire recovery time (almost 3 months at the time of this writing) was that I had no motivation to do anything but sit in front of my TV and watch shows. I had no desire to even sit in my yard.

Around the second week I knew that I had to get outside. My kids, older teenagers, and husband had watered some plants until now. I used my walker to get outside to water. I was still under doctors orders to not bend over to pick anything off of the ground and ended up using a grabber to pick up my water hose and get plants watered. This was a struggle to move the hose around my property. I think it took me twice as long to water during this time.

Watering was the only thing I did in the yard for around 3 weeks. I still had little motivation to do anything. That was frustrating since I usually go nonstop. At 3 weeks, I had my first post surgery check up. My doctor instructed that I am able to do almost anything except jumping and running. He did let me know that I needed to exercise more.

At this point I started to go outside more. I began to try to pull weeds. This was difficult. Bending down and sitting on my legs to weed was really hard and somewhat painful, so instead I slowly bent over to pull a few weeds at a time. I did prune a few dead branches off of some shrubs that were level with me. The easiest thing to work on in the garden was on my raised vegetable beds. I was able to clean out those to get ready to plant some fall vegetables.

At almost 2 months after surgery I was doing almost everything normal in the garden. I have been weeding normally- catching up on the weeds that grew when I wasn’t able to go outside. I have been preparing vegetable beds, weeding them, and planting seeds for cool season crops. Some bamboo was cut that was growing to close to the house. I, also, have planted some plants but those were in small pots. Luckily, I didn’t need to dig a big hole for them. Additionally, I was able to dig up a small unwanted tree that sprouted earlier this year and I didn’t have a chance to get to it until then. I am saving some chores until I am a little further down the road to recovery. But, for the most part I feel almost back to normal. I feel lucky.

Gardening After Hip Replacement

My experience was unique to me. I would highly recommend to follow your doctors orders and to not overdue any physical activities after surgery. Going into my surgery, what I heard was that I would not be able to garden for quite some time. After my surgery I learned that it was almost the opposite. Every time I talked to my doctor he told me that I needed more exercise. I quickly learned that I wasn’t doing enough. The major turning point for me was after the two month mark. I felt almost back to normal at two months post surgery.

I do recommend listening to your body. Take your time and do it right. Raised beds and container gardens are your friends during this time. Use them to the best of your ability. If you don’t feel like gardening take a break from it and come back at another time. Here are the activities that I recommend.

The Month Following Surgery:

Gardening activities most appropriate within the month following surgery:

• enjoying being outside in your garden- take your mind off of the recovery process and try to relax
• watering your garden
• planning for future activities- looking at magazine and seed catalogs, getting ideas from online sources, reading gardening books, watch garden shows
• start a journal about what you see happening in the garden, what kinds of insects and/or birds do you see
• harvest edibles around your garden (I attached a bag to my walker and collected vegetables to bring in the house to eat)

One Month After Surgery:

Garden Activities After One Month of Surgery:

• any activities mentioned above
• include trimming plants that are waist high and taller
• working in raised beds- weeding, preparing to plant, planting- provided there is a place to sit and work in the beds
• enjoy being outside in the garden-even if you are limited to activities
• filling up your bird feeders (and humming bird feeders) if you have them
• work on tying plants to a trellis for those plants that need it

Two Months After Surgery:

Garden Activities After Two Months after Surgery:

• any and all activities mentioned in the above sections
• weeding the garden in short time periods
• Deadheading any blooms that are finished blooming (unless you are leaving the seeds for the birds-something I do often)
• Cutting plants back that might be getting leggy
• planting seeds in small pots for future transplant
• planting smaller plants in the ground
• applying fertilizers to garden spaces
• Raking leaves

Three Months After Surgery and Beyond:

Garden Activities After Three Months of Surgery:

• any and all of the activities mentioned in the above sections
• Cutting the lawn
• cutting larger plants like bamboo, large shrubs, and trees (no climbing tall ladders, yet)
• digging holes to plant larger shrubs and small trees
• plant new sod if needed
• Spreading compost or mulch
• Dividing perennials and replanting

Caution with these gardening activities

The few gardening activities that I would wait on until you are at least 6 months into recovery time or you have doctors approval are:

• planting large trees- that is a lot of digging and you want to wait until you are cleared for this type of activity
• creating new garden beds, especially raised beds
• trimming large trees

Tools That Make Gardening Easier

There are some tools that can help make gardening easier during your recovery time. My favorite tool that I used after surgery was a reacher/grabber tool. I dropped so much stuff on the ground after surgery and this helped tremendously. It also helped to play with my dogs when I needed to pick up their ball off the ground to throw it.

Automatic hose reels can be a great addition to help reel in your hose when you are trying to put your hose up after watering. This is something that is really nice to have even without having surgery.

Long reach and ergonomically shaped gardening tools are wonderful to have when you are not allowed to bend over to weed your garden. These also help people that have arthritis in other parts of your body.

Portable gardening bench/kneeler‘s are perfect when you need to keep your body upright and still weed or plant your seedlings. This tool keeps you from having to sit on the ground to complete garden activities. My mother uses her garden kneeler all the time.

Try To Stay Positive

Having hip replacement surgery was extremely traumatic for me. I would recommend to try and see the good that will come out of having this surgery. I struggled for weeks every time I looked at my scar. It is still very prominent on my upper leg and I see it every time I change clothes. But, I no longer ask myself why I had the surgery. One day you will wake up and not think about the surgery at all. Try to stay positive and know that things will get better for you and you will eventually be able to get back in the garden- the place you love the most.