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.

Another rain, Another Round of Lilies!

Rain Lilies and Chives

All the Rainlilies in the previous posts have shrivelled up and died. I was going to post a picture of shrivelled-up rain lilies, but it was TOO DEPRESSING. But then, we had ANOTHER good rain (not 3 inches, but some) and we got a few stragglers.  It is so unusual; in August the THOUSAND YEAR DROUGHT was so bad, the ground was a dead gray, with no vegetation, as you know from my previous posts, it LOOKED like  the world after several frosts, but it was 106˚ out!

Rain Lily and....I think WEEDS

Now, everywhere, because of the rain, flowers are blooming and “grass” (native weeds) are growing, and it is a reasonable temperature (70˚-90˚), so it feels for all the world like Spring! P*L*U*S, everyone is planting their garden!

Honestly, Texas is another planet. Seriously, Ya’ll.

More Neighborhood Rain Lilies

Lilies from my neighbor M.J.'s garden (Yes, I think she IS that M.J.)

Yeah, yeah, I know this is a whole lot of pictures and not much writing! But LOOK at the Shiny Things!!

In Motorcycle guy's Front Treelawn

This shot captures the feel of them better

Rain Lilies contrasting nicely with Candlestick Plant

Certain Rain Actually Occurs

Behold the wheelbarrow full of rain water!

How about some nice RAIN PICTURES? Because it DID rain!

Remember how I said that I might awaken to the sound of rain and thunder? It actually happened just like that! It rained pretty near three inches before I even got up the next morning. Rain has actually CONTINUED, off and on, for two days now. It has been a light, gentle rain for the most part, so my seeds and soil have not washed away.

Watch the Broccoli plants double in size before your very eyes!

Very Happy Basil Plants

Remember those relocated Artichokes? hey lived and are now putting out teeny tiny leaves

Rain Lilies

The Gorgeous Red Rain Lilies

Following in the wake of the FABULOUS, LIFE-GIVING RAIN, have come the Rain Lilies. Rain lilies are tender and fragile, grow overnight and last only a few days, but there is no better harbinger of Autumn (Here in Hundred-and-five-degrees Land, harbingers of cooler weather are likely to to cause fainting fits of joy).

Rain Lilies in the Bulb Bed

In my yard, the variety that appears are the RED ones; and Damn It, every year I FORGET that they are coming, and they always come out (they grow overnight) in the midst of thick weeds (because I haven’t weeded yet). Getting the weeds out without damaging the Rain Lilies is impossible, but letting them be choked with weeds is a travesty. The only solution is to try to weed around them.

Individual White Rain Lilies

Down the street the rain lilies are the WHITE ones. The white rain lilies don’t grow in clumps like the red ones; they are individual and tend to cover whole lawns.

Let’s Love them while they last!

Significant Rain in Central Texas !!!

POURING RAIN. Look against the dark trees: you can SEE it!

Remember my snarky and bitter comment about having to skip weeding because of RAIN? Followed by bitter bitter laughter? Well, I guess my bitter laughter is exactly what the RAIN GODS wanted to hear, because it has been RAINING. A LOT!

It is the G*R*E*A*T*E*S*T thing ever!

I don’t believe that people who live in normal areas of the world can even begin to apprehend what rain means to a Westerner. Even in good times, rain is never a nuisance or a given; it is always a Blessing of the Gods. Add to that the worst drought IN RECORDED HISTORY (meaning, there has not been a drought this bad in Central Texas since the beginning of recorded history, which includes analyzing tree rings, so we are talking about a thousand years. Worst drought in a Thousand years, people!)

water, ACTUALLY POOLING on the GROUND in my yard

We had the unheard of, the I have only experienced it a few times in my life experience of ALL NIGHT RAIN. That is to say, it rained in the evening, and the rain continued all night and into the morning. I know, I know, in Connecticut and West Virginia and Cape Cod that is an event so common as to be utterly unremarkable; in Texas, like I said, it has only happened a few times in my forty-odd year lifespan.

It was enough rain to actually make a difference,. The drought is not over now (I think for the last two years we are below average rainfall by thirty inches and that isn’t going to be made up in a day or even three), but we actually got enough rain for (I think!) the lake levels to GO UP a few feet, and for the ground soil to be dampened more than an inch at the top. (It would be interesting to know how deeply the soil became dampened; during the summer I had a neighbor tell me that in digging his yard, the soil was a little damp on top but absolute dust at two feet deep.)

More water pooling on the ground in the Downpour

North of here, at the Weather Hell that seems to be Jarrel, Texas, I heard they got SIXTEEN INCHES; I would guess the rainfall at my house to be about 6 inches, and it is on record that in Salado they got fourteen inches.

And it is not over yet: More rain is predicted!

What has happened is, a very large multi-state system is circling Austin, and spinning like a hurricane (but slowly), with us at the center, raining all the time. The clouds are very unusually low, it looks as though we are on a mountain top. It is funny: on Friday evening I phoned Dave and said : “Look at the sky! It looks like Katrina!”

Rain Clouds

But I had grown so bitter and tired of disappointment that I just figured that, since the ominous clouds were in the EAST, that they weren’t coming our way. (The prevailing winds here are always northwest to southeast). But because of the spinning nature of the storm, the clouds to the East circled around and did come.

So far, anyway, my prediction of a rainy autumn is coming true. BUT: I haven’t been able to WEED in a WEEK! In a way, I was glad, because HAD I managed to weed the whole thing prior to the storm (which I hadn’t even planned to do: the PLAN is, to have it weeded by the first of October!) then my topsoil would have washed away. As it is, the weeds held it in place.

Weeding to begin tomorrow; it is only a 20% chance of rain.

Thank God for those Pernicious Weeds! Holding the topsoil down

YAY RAIN!