Plastic

My arms, legs, hips and hands are killing me. I have spent the last week ripping out the plastic liner from about 400 square feet of gardening space, which is only half of it. My new house has a huge garden, or at least, lots and lots of garden areas. It's pretty sparsely decorated with some tiny azalea bushes, some horrible, tough grass with these little purple berries that stain everything when they get on your shoes, about a million hostas and quite a few burning bushes some of which are half dead. In other words, the garden needs some love.

I have arthritis. I have it almost everywhere in my body. It's in every joint in every finger, it's in my wrists, my shoulders, my hips, knees and in ever joint in every toe. My spine has a bizarre deformity called spondylolisthesis(see wikipedia)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondylolisthesis
as well as degenerative joint disease and arthritis. Those things sound like they are mostly the same thing, but they add up to lots of pain in the garden. But I regress....I need to move on.

The first step has been to remove this plastic covering. The soil in Northern Virginia is mostly clay and this soil has not been treated with lime or anything. Just the plastic sheet on top of the clay where these poor plants are trying to find a place to hang on.

The plastic had to go.

I thought it would be a lot easier for some reason, disposing of the cheap chunks of wood chip mulch and just tearing up the yards of plastic. In fact, I have been looking forward to just sort of wildly throwing the mulch into the wheelbarrow and yanking and ripping the plastic and working out all my frustrations. Unfortunately, the plastic didn't come up that easily because it was staked down; so no ripping for me. The mulch was a disaster and I couldn't find the shovel. Damn shovel was out in the woods where my nine-year-old was using it to dig himself a trench. Oh well.

So I used a pitchfork, which of course is like trying to eat soup with a knife. Many messy hours later, I lay on the driveway with mud smeared all over me, my muscles and joints throbbing and desperately wanting a date with a big bottle of Advil. But the garden was clean according to my definition. Now the hard work would begin.

The clay needs to be prepped, the garden needs a retaining wall, the compost needs to be turned and spread as well as the rest of the soil. Then the real gardening begins. The plants go in. Little by little.

For now, it's into a hot shower. Then cool sheets.