Re: Easy Street teeth and worms

>Seriously, building new beds is hard work.  I started building a new one
>this past weekend and I was on Nuprin pain reliever by Saturday night.  I
>was digging this new flower bed with a shovel and it was pure clay (or was
>it really concrete?).

Amen to that, Donald. Doreen, my condolences. And Claire, I love your
suggestion of using a newsprint layer under compost to smother existing
grass. I will try that on the new veggie garden we'll need for next year.
Normally I take your tack and ignore any big rocks the trowel doesn't
encounter, but for the past few weeks, I've needed to clean out deeper
holes than I normally dig in my yard, to accommodate 10 buried muck
buckets, and so I've been wielding the pick ax a lot.

I was surprised how much impact from the pick strike travels right up the
arms and into the mouth. This was major league impact, enough to chip
teeth. If you hold your teeth apart and resist the urge to clench them as
the pick swings down, you save your incisors ... but sometimes your mind
wanders and you forget to hold your mouth open and consequently bite your
tongue. Remembering takes discipline. Probably people whose dentists nag
them not to grind their teeth in their sleep ought to wear their night
guards out into the garden when they're going to be using the pick to oust
5 billion rocks.

I also encountered a dilemma in trying to strain out little rocks. If I
used my compost sifter and shook the dirt through its holes, all the
earthworms and ground beetles and spiders in the dirt wound up mangled. I
tried using the hose to wash the dirt through, but there's so much clay in
my dirt, it clogged the sifter. Any suggestions on how to separate 5
billion rocks from dirt quickly without killing helpful soil critters?

celia
storey@aristotle.net
Little Rock
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