I am a big believer in digging your own garden. Like, digging with a shovel.
Don't get me wrong, tillers are OK, but there's just something about getting out with a shovel, woman versus dirt. It takes marginally longer to dig a garden yourself--although I would even debate that if you don't own your own tiller and you have to go rent one--but is it really more work? No. And further, it's kind of zen. Birds chirping, the rhythmic "swack" of the shovel being thrust into the earth--so much better than an obnoxious, motorized creature.
I was very firm in that conviction until this evening. I had an hour after work,so I decided to go outside and see what I could do about digging out some viney, ground cover that's growing around the trees in our backyard. We want to re-seed the grass this weekend, but the vines have to be dug out first.
Brief back-story. When we bought this house (early last summer), we discovered the previous owners (whom we love, in general) had developed kind of a live-and-let-live attitude towards some of the landscaping. Towards some of the very invasive landscaping.
Last fall we were able to temporarily rescue the two trees in our backyard, which were covered in vines, but we knew the battle would have to be waged again in the spring. Sure enough, when I went outside this evening the vines were already sneakily trying to creep back up the trees.
I took my shovel to them. I took my rake to them. I even tried my ax. But in the end, there were still far too many vines criss-crossing the ground around the bases of the trees.
By the time Sweet Husband got home from work, I was ready to admit that perhaps we might need to think about renting a tiller. Except that, as Sweet Husband wisely pointed out, it would take an unthinkable beast of a tiller to conquer the vines without killing the tiller.
What to do?
"What about a weed burner?" Sweet Husband asked.
Being a boy, Sweet Husband is abnormally attracted to fire. In fact, last summer when we were doing the more heavy duty "landscaping" of the invasives, we considered getting a weed burner to make quicker work of it. (For those of you who don't know what a weed burner is, picture the device that would ensue if a normal torch and a flame thrower had babies. It's somewhere in the middle.) For budgetary reasons, we ultimately decided we could do without it then, but tonight--after wrestling with the vines alone--I was much more willing to consider the idea.
Sweet Husband hopped onto Amazon and quickly found one, and for a bargain price. I was almost sold when he showed me the screen. In the bottom right hand corner, however, was the potential deal breaker....
Complete with a picture of someone's arm in a cast were the words, "Customers who bought this item also bought the adjustable pillow splint."
Maybe tomorrow night I'll give it another hack with the shovel?
