Blood, Sweat and Seeds

When I got home I had two M&Ms cookies with a cone of whipped cream on top, and then I went to work.  You'd think after a full day at the day job I'd want to put my feet up, or maybe at least cook some dinner and watch a movie or something.

That would be far too sensible.

We had rain in the local forecast, and I remembered I had all these old seeds I hadn't gotten around to planting.  Bags and bags of them.  And I thought, I'll just scatter them around and the rain will soak them in and what comes up, comes up.

But of course it's never that simple.

First I planted some ancient marigold seeds out in the veggie garden, and then I checked out the area I had planned for my mass old seed dumping ground.  It's about sixty feet long and ten to twenty feet wide, depending on the section.  The kids had, as instructed, dug out the majority of the blackberry roots, so I figured I'd just toss the seeds on the bare ground and go inside and have dinner.  I grabbed a rake (big mistake) and went to break the crust on the soil.

Hard as a rock.  Seriously.  I felt so betrayed!  Normally the soil under blackberries is quite soft.  They form their own sort of (evil) duff that keeps the soil moist and suppresses weeds.  And a few of the areas were like that, but way too much of it felt like baked clay so hard that I understood why even the grass hadn't started to take root there (yet.)  First I debated attacking the areas with a hoe.  Couldn't find one.  Then I considered  a shovel.  Mind you, this is after work, and I knew it would get dark soon, and breaking up rock hard dirt with a shovel is no light, quick task.

The impending darkness settled it for me.  I would get the big rototiller.

One sweaty, sore, throat-sore-from-suppressed-cussing half-hour later I had the whole section tilled.  I scattered the seeds, keeping particular kinds more or less together, raked the now (mostly) soft dirt to roughly cover at least some of the seeds in case they needed to be covered to sprout, and went home.  I had just enough time to gather eggs from the coup and close the chickens in for the night before the dark swooped in.  I had to turn on lights when I came in so that I could find my way around the house.

So now I'm thinking (I'm crazy that way) that I'd just put a whole lot of work into seeding an area that may or may not have viable seeds scattered on it.  So sometime this week I'm going to do yet another ridiculous thing.  I'm going to get a bunch of fresh seeds of something tall, bomb-proof and pretty, like cosmos or baby's breath or bachelor buttons (or maybe all of the above), and mix it with a big bag of potting soil and scatter that around the area as well.

That should fix it up real nice.

And then I'll be done.

Except for putting in the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and other stuff.

Oh, and I have a few more discounted bulbs to put in.

But then I'll be done.

Really.

Mostly done, anyway.