The Things They Buried
Posted by Heather Harris
I went out last weekend to finally plant my raspberries. I know from past experience that one spindly little cane will miraculously explode into millions of shoots in the spring, soon poking through every inconvenient place in my garden. I planted two at my last house and had enough raspberries to feed my marauding children, wandering dinner guests, and the neighborhood's entire bird population with enough left over to stuff my freezer for the winter. This knowledge however, did not prevent me from buying more, five to be exact. (Well six if you count the cutting overwintered from our last house, which I should, but I won't.) I got a discount for buying in gross!
Anyway, planting anything right now is a major chore and ill-advised if I want to have any sort of master plan for my vegetable garden. What looks like fairly decent grass in pictures, is really a special mix of 70% buttercup, 10% prickly weed, 8% crab grass, 5% morning glory, 5% blackberry shoots, and 2% turf. This lovely blend is supported by 6,234 gopher mounds. Greg has planting boxes stacking up higher every weekend on the back deck to help me tame the wilderness, but getting everything ready for vegetables is still several weeks off, and the raspberries won't wait (well, I won't wait) .
So I took out my spade and shovel and found a most likely terrible spot with a dubious prospect for sun, that's only recommendations are that it is out of the way of the vegetable garden project and along a fence. This plot of ground that I crammed the 5 (okay, 6) raspberries in is only about 8 feet long by 3 feet wide. Nevertheless, here is what I found as I hauled up the clumps of heavy, waterlogged "sod":
2 retaining wall blocks
3 long edging bricks
9(!) tomato cages
3 huge rusty nails
1 broken garden cultivator
This is what was buried in 24 square feet. The vegetable garden is going to be 1,080 square feet. If my math is correct, and this yard debris per square foot ratio holds, there are 810 objects waiting to be unearthed. The only thing encouraging about this is the evidence that someone else has attempted to do something with this weed infested field as well. It's a bit like a person trudging up a mountain on the Oregon Trail must have felt when they saw the broken wheels, chairs, tin cans and trinkets strewn along the path that had been chucked out of a wagon by a an earlier pioneer. Something like,"Times are bad. My oxen are stuck. Mom has smallpox. The last moldy biscuit is gone. My feet are blistered and cracked. But I'm not dead and, and by God, someone else has suffered too!" Comforting thoughts for a backbreaking day in the garden. Oh! AND I have 9 more tomato cages! I just doubled my tomato production capabilities!
Anyway, planting anything right now is a major chore and ill-advised if I want to have any sort of master plan for my vegetable garden. What looks like fairly decent grass in pictures, is really a special mix of 70% buttercup, 10% prickly weed, 8% crab grass, 5% morning glory, 5% blackberry shoots, and 2% turf. This lovely blend is supported by 6,234 gopher mounds. Greg has planting boxes stacking up higher every weekend on the back deck to help me tame the wilderness, but getting everything ready for vegetables is still several weeks off, and the raspberries won't wait (well, I won't wait) .So I took out my spade and shovel and found a most likely terrible spot with a dubious prospect for sun, that's only recommendations are that it is out of the way of the vegetable garden project and along a fence. This plot of ground that I crammed the 5 (okay, 6) raspberries in is only about 8 feet long by 3 feet wide. Nevertheless, here is what I found as I hauled up the clumps of heavy, waterlogged "sod":
2 retaining wall blocks
3 long edging bricks
9(!) tomato cages
3 huge rusty nails
1 broken garden cultivator
This is what was buried in 24 square feet. The vegetable garden is going to be 1,080 square feet. If my math is correct, and this yard debris per square foot ratio holds, there are 810 objects waiting to be unearthed. The only thing encouraging about this is the evidence that someone else has attempted to do something with this weed infested field as well. It's a bit like a person trudging up a mountain on the Oregon Trail must have felt when they saw the broken wheels, chairs, tin cans and trinkets strewn along the path that had been chucked out of a wagon by a an earlier pioneer. Something like,"Times are bad. My oxen are stuck. Mom has smallpox. The last moldy biscuit is gone. My feet are blistered and cracked. But I'm not dead and, and by God, someone else has suffered too!" Comforting thoughts for a backbreaking day in the garden. Oh! AND I have 9 more tomato cages! I just doubled my tomato production capabilities!
Posts
0 comments: