Double Digging: or, YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME

This is the area I need to Double-Dig. At the far end you see the pathetically small cube of a hole we managed to dig in 8 hours.

I was reading somewhere in my swirling vortex of perpetual reading (it is really rather like a tornado of printed words, except for IT LASTS FOREVER) about a group of Austinites who volunteer to spend their weekends DOUBLE-DIGGING gardens for people who cannot do it for themselves. This group is called THE GREEN CORN PROJECT.

When I started gardening, like a decade ago, in my CRAP SOIL urban CALICHE gravel-pit yard, I read up on Double Digging, and you know, it sounded really great. Like WOW, what a great way to make your garden be AWESOME! What it is is this: You dig all the soil out of a reasonable part of your garden (like say a 4 foot X 4 foot area), and you dig it rather deep (I forget, but like 2 feet deep or more). You pile the dirt on the ground.

THEN, you dig ANOTHER 4 X 4 foot area, and this time, you pile the dirt into the hole you already dug. Repeat until the whole garden has been double-dug, and then, in the last hole, you put the ORIGINAL dirt that you piled on the ground.

NOW, your garden will be super radically awesomely great and your plants will be able to grow deep roots, PLUS, it has all been “aerated” with oxygen which stimulates the soil organisms that feed your plantios.

Awesome, right?

A scientific image of DOUBLE-DIGGING instructions from the internet

Except, I dug about a six inch CUBE and I said to myself:  TOO. HARD.

And I lay my trowel aside and mopped my red-faced brow. (TROWEL? TROWEL you say? Yes. Because my soil is so hard and full of gravel and stones that a regular shovel, where you step on it, it doesn’t GO IN!!! So you kind of have to scrape the dirt with a trowel…sideways. Have I mentioned that my soil is SUB-PAR?)

So, what I did was, I went for the “Raised Bed” style of gardening, where I just pile like a metric TON of compost on the crappy ground and grow stuff in the compost. And it has worked well for me, mostly.

But last year and the year before, I just COULD NOT get anything (besides spinach) to grow in my two sunniest beds. And really, these beds should be my very BEST beds. Windy, well-drained, sunny….but instead all the plants I planted there were stunted and withered and did not produce. AT ALL.

So I thought: “Hey..if these VOLUNTEERS at the Green Corn Project are willing to spend their precious weekends double-digging for strangers, I can certainly do it for my own stupid self!”

I mean REALLY, right?

The Dirt that Was Removed. THIS IS A LOT OF DIRT!!

So, enlisting the help of my husband, I set aside a WHOLE DAY to double-dig these two beds. Except, I was going to do even BETTER than double digging. These beds are FULL of gravel, the soil is virtually solid gravel, with this greasy, horrible gray clay underneath. So, my plan was to SCREEN the dirt, get the gravel out, and return the soil sans gravel.

And you know what? We did it. Over a period of TWO DAYS, we dug, screened and double dug…..

A TWO FOOT BY TWO FOOT CUBE.

That soil was so made out of solid caliche that Dave had to get out the DIGGING BAR, a twenty pound rod of solid iron, and use it to break up the rock. We removed something like a dozen gigantic buckets of gravel.

The horrible greasy clay was the worst part: the consistency of Colby cheese, it had to be grated through the screen LABORIOUSLY in a mind-numbingly LENGTHLY process. OUR BACKS ACHED, our arms trembled.

Torrential rains were promised for the weekend, so, instead of continuing on and double digging the entire area (which apparently will take…..8X3X2….48 solid hours...6 straight 8 hour days!!!!!!) we had to shovel the screened soil back into the hole, so it wouldn’t wash away.

The Pathetic Hole. Actually, it is deeper than it looks....but it is still only about a THIRD of ONE bed.

(The Torrential Rains have come, too!  AND WHILE I AM ON THE SUBJECT:

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE LOCAL TV METEOROLOGISTS? On the news tonight, there they were, grinning away like GOONS, saying INSULTINGLY MINDLESS sentences like “Oh, too bad about the rain, maybe we can salvage a little of the weekend blah blah blah, rain= bad amirite?…” Dave and I stared at one another, aghast, and Dave said:

“HOW GODDAM SHORT ARE THEIR MEMORIES?”

I mean, seriously, we just came out of the Worst Drought In Recorded History!!  The Wort Drought in NON-Recorded history!!  According to TREE rings, the Worst Drought in, what, 6000 years?!?!?!!? SIX THOUSAND YEARS!!!

And these Blockheads, these Dunderheads, these…these……facile, empty-headed morons are COMPLAINING about RAIN?!?!?!

Honestly, do most American think FOOD comes out of the Replicator or something? We all eat FOOD! Food requires RAIN. Rain is much, much more than some kind of impediment to your goddam golf game.

(What I wouldn’t give for a TV meteorologist who isn’t some kind of COMPLETE KNOW-NOTHING.)

Where was I?

The Double-Digging shall continue, when the weather permits. I will keep you ABREAST of  DEVELOPMENTS! But the verdict still is: You Have Got to be Kidding Me, This Is the Hardest Thing In the World, I Need Like Thirty Volunteers To Help Me Do This.

THE gorgeous, gorgeous double-dug (portion of a) bed.