The Demo Site

Okay. I’ll admit it. I had to take a day off between Day 1 and Day 2. Sure, I COULD have hit the beds two days in a row right at the outset, but I found millions of other very important things to do. Frankly, I was incredibly sore from Day 1. My shoulders and biceps were the hardest hit. I suppose I wasn’t using my abs enough because they felt reasonably intact.

If you count days in an Old Testament kind of way, where days of rest are figured in too, this would be Day 3, but I think my stats are gonna look entirely pathetic if I count rest days on this project, so I’m simply not gonna do it. Still, on the bright side, yesterday (my Day 2) I got the same number of square feet done in LESS than half the time. Partly, it took time on Day 1 to mobilize a heaped-up wheelbarrow of compost and get it over to the worst part of the garden. Also, the first one-foot-wide row of a double digging job always takes the longest because you have to put that first top layer of earth in a different wheelbarrow and get it over onto a tarp at the length-wise side of the bed for use at the very end of the project. Once all that is done, you move one-foot chunks of soil over and mix it in with your compost as you go. If you get into a uninterrupted rhythm, you can actually start to make good time.

Did I mention that this digging and compost mixing needs to get to a depth of 24 inches? The good news is that I did actually feel as if that Day 1 digging helped me become a stronger, smarter ditch digger on Day 2. Even though today we have our church of the farmers’ market to attend, kid-duty (in particular a must-do Easter egg-hunt), a bunch of landscape-design work, and an in-law visit today, I plan on getting a bigger chunk of the garden dug by sundown. Sheesh…sometimes (but only rarely, say, at times like these) I wonder why I’m such a freakin’ optimist!