Gardening: When you can't move Heaven...

Move earth. 

Words once spoken cannot be retracted and time once passed cannot be relived. We may only control what we do with today.



The weather was perfect this weekend for me to resume my gardening project. I spent both days digging in the dirt. 
Gardening is my therapy and I spend alot of time thinking about all kinds of things. I am in the early stages of my project and that means I have to dig. I find that I'm not only digging into the ground but into myself at the same time. Unearthing all the stuff that gets in the way. 

What I started with on Saturday morning

To have a successful and beautiful garden, one must prepare the space for plants to prosper. For me as a person, to have a beautiful and successful life I must also prepare my inner self to move forward. A garden full of weeds and rocks prevents the flowers from reaching their greatest potential. Weeds rob the plants of nutrients and rocks get in the way of strong roots. As people our emotional baggage and difficulties are like the weeds and rocks. Emotional baggage can prevent us from exploring new opportunities or secretly sabotage our efforts. Rocks are the hard places we find ourselves in, like the saying between a rock and a hard place. Deal with it, learn from it and set it aside.


During the day Saturday as I worked on digging out the first section of the large bed, I began to feel like Charlie Brown trick-or-treating. He always gets rocks and so was I! With almost each shovel full of dirt I could repeat his saying "I got a rock". By the end of the day Saturday I had a pile like this:

It seemed every time I pushed that shovel into the ground, I was hitting a rock. So I started thinking about rocks and what they represent for me. I decided to start naming these rocks. Each one I dug out and set aside represents a difficulty I have faced. Some are large and some are small, but so are the problems we encounter as we move through time and space. By the end of the day Sunday, my pile was even bigger:

Most important for me is the setting aside of these rocks. Get them out of the way. Removing the rocks is like getting out of our own way. Sometimes people use their rocks to build emotional walls. Those walls not only shut out the world but shuts them in behind the walls. I want to be free so the rocks must be dug out, identified and discarded.
I spent Saturday evening doing some research on ways to prepare gardens for planting or just getting rid of crabgrass. I found out crabgrass is not the nemesis I face. I have the dreaded Bermuda grass. No wonder it is so hard to eradicate! This stuff not only sprouts seedheads BUT it also creates rhizomes and stolons as it grows horizontally across and under the ground. So even if you think you have pulled it out, there may be a piece of it left which will begin growing again putting you right back where you started. It is frustrating to say the least. 
Here is the other problem with Bermuda grass: Its seeds may be viable for up to EIGHT YEARS! That's right! One little seed of Bermuda grass may lay dormant for eight years and then germinate to begin the growth all over again. I pretty much came to the conclusion that in the event of nuclear holocaust all that will be left are cockroaches and Bermuda grass. 
I looked all this up because after a full day of digging and hauling dirt my entire body ached and I was considering renting a tiller to do the rest of the job. I found out that would be the worst thing I could do. If I used a tiller it would cut the Bermuda grass into little pieces which would each grow anew and my bed would be more full of it than ever. 
Emotional baggage is like Bermuda grass. If allowed to creep in, it sends out runners. Soon before you know it, that garbage has taken over and it chokes out the beauty and flowers we could have in our lives. Leaving us with bitterness. Dig deep and remove it. Be vigilant in removing any survivors or new invaders. It is the only way. 
By the end of the day on Sunday when the shadows were growing long, I finished digging out the first section of the big bed. 

This area is 8ft across and 15ft to the house. 

Pretty good progress has been made and I can barely move! 
I also did some research Saturday evening concerning how much blended topsoil I will need to replace the infested dirt I remove. Blended topsoil is a 50/50 of topsoil and composted manure which is nutrient rich and perfect for flower or vegetable gardens. I will need seven cubic yards. This means I have to remove seven cubic yards. As my husband said on Sunday when he came out to review my work: That's alot of digging! 
This is what I have left:

Considering all that I dug out this weekend, I am calculating that I can have the remainder of the bed dug out by the end of February providing the weather holds on the weekends. 
Then I can build my retaining wall to take the place of the landscape timbers I removed. I have decided on which block I will use. 

Oldcastle 12" Red Castle Wall Block  

Image from www.lowes.com

It will match the foundation of the house and my red door. I will need about 136 blocks to make a wall 3 blocks high. I've never done a retaining wall before but Tiffany has and she promises to help me. Thank God for friends! 

At the end of it all, every muscle aches even those I didn't know existed but I managed to get a good chunk of the garden done. We must remove or deal with the rocks and weeds to make way for the flowers. 


How do you deal with the "rocks" in your garden?