Inch By Inch, Row By Row, Part II: In Which I Acquire Dirt
Oh, hi! Was I neglcting my blog? sorry, I didn't mean to. I've just been so busy. In my garden. Planting, and weeding, and watering, and generally being all farmer-y and whatnot.
How did it come to this pass, you might ask? How did a die-hard urbanite like me become a...gardener?
Well. When last we spoke, I was whining about dirt, and about the impasse that emerged when it became clear that I might need to suck it up and buy some. And that might have continued right up through planting season, had not a timely message come through on my synagogue listserv.
I get a lot of messages on my synagogue listserv. Mostly they're about rallies I can't go to, or political/spiritual debates I don't feel like joining. But this one jumped out at me, because the post-er was offering dirt! Free dirt! And she promised it was all organic and compost-rich and worm-casey and good! Someone had bought the land where her garden plot was, and was going to put a garage on it, and she didn't want all her soil to go to waste. All I had to do was reply, and come get it at the appointed time, and I could have all I wanted!
When I got to the garden the next Wednesday, it was so crowded I couldn't even find a parking spot. Gosh. I had no idea that dirt was so popular, though really I should've known if I'd thought about it. Not being entirely sure how I was going to contain or transport it, I'd brought a wheelbarrow, a shovel, a big tarp, our yard waste bin, and about 40 little plastic grocery bags. I shoveled a few shovelfuls of dirt into each bag, tied them closed, and put them on top of the tarp in the back of our van. As it turned out, I didn't need the yard waste bin at all. The bags were all snug and tidy piled up on each other in the van, sort of like the pellets of heroin that the heroine swallows in Maria Full of Grace. But much bigger. Like pellets that a huge heroin-smuggling giant would swallow. If dirt were heroin.
So. Then I had dirt!
By this point, I had weeded one section of my incipient garden patch--the section where RW had planced flowers the year before. The rest of it was so very, very weedy that I despaired. So I only had that one small patch of dirt on which to dump the new organic dirt.
But dirt does, in fact, take up space. So I had to shovel out some old dirt to make room for the new dirt. This I accomplished by putting the old, bad dirt into the wheelbarrow, and also dumping some on top of the weeds, and then emptying all the plastic bags into the cleared space in a big hill.
Already, gardening was turning out to be much more about logistics than I had bargained for. Also, my back was starting to hurt.
How did it come to this pass, you might ask? How did a die-hard urbanite like me become a...gardener?
Well. When last we spoke, I was whining about dirt, and about the impasse that emerged when it became clear that I might need to suck it up and buy some. And that might have continued right up through planting season, had not a timely message come through on my synagogue listserv.
I get a lot of messages on my synagogue listserv. Mostly they're about rallies I can't go to, or political/spiritual debates I don't feel like joining. But this one jumped out at me, because the post-er was offering dirt! Free dirt! And she promised it was all organic and compost-rich and worm-casey and good! Someone had bought the land where her garden plot was, and was going to put a garage on it, and she didn't want all her soil to go to waste. All I had to do was reply, and come get it at the appointed time, and I could have all I wanted!
When I got to the garden the next Wednesday, it was so crowded I couldn't even find a parking spot. Gosh. I had no idea that dirt was so popular, though really I should've known if I'd thought about it. Not being entirely sure how I was going to contain or transport it, I'd brought a wheelbarrow, a shovel, a big tarp, our yard waste bin, and about 40 little plastic grocery bags. I shoveled a few shovelfuls of dirt into each bag, tied them closed, and put them on top of the tarp in the back of our van. As it turned out, I didn't need the yard waste bin at all. The bags were all snug and tidy piled up on each other in the van, sort of like the pellets of heroin that the heroine swallows in Maria Full of Grace. But much bigger. Like pellets that a huge heroin-smuggling giant would swallow. If dirt were heroin.
So. Then I had dirt!
By this point, I had weeded one section of my incipient garden patch--the section where RW had planced flowers the year before. The rest of it was so very, very weedy that I despaired. So I only had that one small patch of dirt on which to dump the new organic dirt.
But dirt does, in fact, take up space. So I had to shovel out some old dirt to make room for the new dirt. This I accomplished by putting the old, bad dirt into the wheelbarrow, and also dumping some on top of the weeds, and then emptying all the plastic bags into the cleared space in a big hill.
Already, gardening was turning out to be much more about logistics than I had bargained for. Also, my back was starting to hurt.
posted by elswhere | 11:13 AM
3 Comments:
yes, logistics. My lovely spouse got me a rototiller for my birthday last year but my birthday is in October so it could only have been used to "put the garden away" as it were and I had a stupid biopsy that week after which I wasn't supposed to do housework but "I can rototill, right?" was answered by "absolutely not!" and the rototiller pined in the barn all winter and then, yay, I got it out this spring to go out there and till and got all the way through the garden once (double yay) and was all ready to go out on Mother's Day and do the second go-round and... it was broken. My only half day without responsibility (Mother's Day gift from children and husband was to go out and do whatever I wanted which was, in this case, rototill) and without rain (can't till in the rain, sadly) and I could not. Oh the unfairness! Oh the frustration!!
So, dear Elswhere, I do feel your pain about the dirt. But, as you have found dirt, I have a fixed tiller (thank you thank you oh kindly car mechanic who let me bring it along with the van for an oil change and said he'd figure it out and DID) and so tomorrow I too will be out there tilling and planting and smooshing the compost in.
Unless it rains.
All best from West Virginia,
I enjoyed reading your post, so don't quit on blogging. Maybe you have a green hand but we will miss you if you stop writing blogs and thats for sure.
You have a great share! Thanks for the post. I love gardening.
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