Breaking Ground
Posted by Heather Harris
I blame the frogs. Their wild, raucous sex blasting through our bedroom windows for the last several weeks had me fooled into believing that spring had arrived on March 7th. The clouds parted for a few precious hours, giving me just enough time to plant all of my early seeds (kale, lettuce, peas, chives) in the one raised bed that is already out in the garden, and to do some serious damage with my pruners. Of course, it doesn't take me too long to do damage with pruners. Clipping and snipping away at blackberries and other brambly nuisances is a passion of mine, and while I'm blissfully chopping and whacking my way across the yard, I always forget that there will be a massive pile of sharp, thorny junk that I will have to cram into my much-to-small debris can when I'm done. The best day of my life was finding out that the Happy Valley garbage men collect yard debris every week! Sometimes I just leave the pile for awhile, hoping it will "dry out" and shrink up a bit, making it easier to cram in later. Ha! On March 7th, however, this was not an option because come hell or high water I as going to strip the sod off of my much anticipated vegetable garden plot on March 8th, and the pile of blackberry canes were directly in the way, so heave-ho into the can they must go.
Well it turns out that March 8th did not get the memo about spring. It did, however, deliver hell and high water. It started so well with the rental of the best agricultural invention since the cotton gin: the sod stripper. I don't know if you've ever tried to remove sod in the more traditional way of using a shovel, but it is the worst gardening activity, hands-down; especially if you were born a woman and lack heft and/or brawny muscles. I have to jump onto the shovel with both feet and then pry the giant clods of earth up, using the ground and shovel handle as a lever and fulcrum. Then I heave the thirty pound clumps up and into a wheel barrow, wheel it somewhere trying not to tip the whole dang thing over, and then figure out where the heck I'm going to put them. After all, the point is to get rid of the grass, not relocate it.
I was not going to do that for
1,080 square feet of grass (or should I say I wasn't going to make my husband do that). So we rented the sod stripper. It's a sexy name for a sexy little tool. It looks sort of like a rototiller, but it has a long horizontal blade that slips just under the surface of the sod and slices the grass right off the top, so that you get a long strip of rollable turf, just like what you get when you buy it at the store. The only problem was that it decided to pour rain ALL day long. The ground was already well saturated from the last few weeks of rain, but without the grass covering, we had turned the garden plot into a slippery, boot sucking mud wallow. And we had 1,080 square feet of water-logged turf to roll, heave,cart, and unload into a sod mountain at the back of our yard. It was not fun. Let' s just leave it at that. However, the whole time I was slogging through the muck, I was imagining the chore without the sod stripper, and imaging myself impaled, out of choice, on the dull end of my shovel. So it could have been worse...so much worse...
Well it turns out that March 8th did not get the memo about spring. It did, however, deliver hell and high water. It started so well with the rental of the best agricultural invention since the cotton gin: the sod stripper. I don't know if you've ever tried to remove sod in the more traditional way of using a shovel, but it is the worst gardening activity, hands-down; especially if you were born a woman and lack heft and/or brawny muscles. I have to jump onto the shovel with both feet and then pry the giant clods of earth up, using the ground and shovel handle as a lever and fulcrum. Then I heave the thirty pound clumps up and into a wheel barrow, wheel it somewhere trying not to tip the whole dang thing over, and then figure out where the heck I'm going to put them. After all, the point is to get rid of the grass, not relocate it.
I was not going to do that for
1,080 square feet of grass (or should I say I wasn't going to make my husband do that). So we rented the sod stripper. It's a sexy name for a sexy little tool. It looks sort of like a rototiller, but it has a long horizontal blade that slips just under the surface of the sod and slices the grass right off the top, so that you get a long strip of rollable turf, just like what you get when you buy it at the store. The only problem was that it decided to pour rain ALL day long. The ground was already well saturated from the last few weeks of rain, but without the grass covering, we had turned the garden plot into a slippery, boot sucking mud wallow. And we had 1,080 square feet of water-logged turf to roll, heave,cart, and unload into a sod mountain at the back of our yard. It was not fun. Let' s just leave it at that. However, the whole time I was slogging through the muck, I was imagining the chore without the sod stripper, and imaging myself impaled, out of choice, on the dull end of my shovel. So it could have been worse...so much worse...
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