When watching me work in the yard a long time ago, one of the three sisties said to me, “It’s a good thing you don’t do this for a living.” She had noticed my slow, inefficient way of doing things and correctly observed that they wouldn’t scale well if I charged for the work. Of course, my time in the garden isn’t a money-making venture. It’s an escape from the daily keyboard and monitor. I am content with the dirt under my fingernails, even if it comes only slowly.
That having been said, there are tasks I dread. And for these, I concede that I need to learn to work efficiently so that I can dilly-dally in the fun stuff. Improving clay soil is one such dreary task.
I can attest that there is no joy in thudding a shovel into clay, in struggling to scrape gunk off the blade, in breaking up sticky clods or in trying to mix good stuff in. Yet the formerly rich topsoil of the garden bed outside our kitchen window has been diluted with big clods of brown and red clay (as the result of the deep holes we dug for the new grounding plates), so the soil there needs improving. I confess, I have no interest in applying my inefficient approach to that task.
However… I have been trying to create a rain garden to capture the (usually rare) rain that runs down our driveway and pours off our roof. And as I have been digging, I have found earthworms by the handful. I spent more than an hour digging today, and as I dug, I collected the worms and dispersed them on the mulch outside the kitchen window. Handsful of them, many handsful. At the end of my otherwise inefficient labor, I must have distributed one hundred worms. And with each toss, I could see that the previous batch had already burrowed down into the mulch, no longer visible on the surface.
Somewhere down there under that mulch, my army of worms is even now at work breaking up the clods and aerating the gunk and pulling organic matter down into the soil — doing the dreary work for me. The paradigm of efficiency.
The sisties would be proud.