Now I’m the crazy neighbor sitting in the rain sifting soggy dirt with a large-holed colander. With about four square foot of the bed done to a depth of six inches, I have decided to be more lax on how many pebbles I am willing to tolerate. Looking at photos of other people’s gardens on Flickr helped too†. I am (was) being far too anal about the pebble situation. We’ll be more careful with the second bed not to mix the actual dirt in our yard with the new dirt and compost to avoid pebbles, but a few pebbles are probably not going to really hurt anything. I don’t remember ever picking anything anyone would call a pebble out of the garden my parents and I had. Unless it was an actual rock, the kind you could throw at someone and maim them, it stayed where it was unless it was downright in the way.
Which doesn’t mean I won’t be going right back out to the garden as soon as this rain shower stops and sifting more dirt, but now I think I’ll use my hands and only pull out really big pebbles and only bother with smaller ones near the surface so the seedlings won’t have problems with their first tender roots. After that, they will just have to work around the odd pebble or two.
Aside from getting over my pebble angst, I also know exactly how far down 3/4″ of rain drains: six inches. Now I just have to figure out how long it takes me to water the equivalent of 3/4″ with the watering hose. Six inches seems like a good depth to water too. I’m sure there’s some way to figure that out. Yes, I am probably being too anal and picky about this as well, and I am sure as the season continues, I will become slightly more lax about this as well. Watering isn’t going to be as crucial to control in the raised beds, because, obviously, unlike the containers from last year, the water has somewhere to drain off … as in down into the somewhat sandy soil underneath.
It looks like we may be getting some really terrible storms tonight, so I’ll be moving my tray of seedlings (which are looking pretty good right now) indoors, and getting Lin to help me move the Earthboxes further up onto the porch so they don’t get blasted by too much wind and water. I might even cover them with plastic, because both of them are already so soggy. For that matter, I don’t even know if the lettuce seeds I planted in the second box are even still planted. They did get rained on pretty hard, and they weren’t planted all that deep. It’ll be another four or so days before I can expect to see the first of them coming up, so nothing to do but wait.
The waiting is really the worst thing about the gardening plan this year. I am so eager to get started, but the only things I can really plant right now are carrots, lettuce, scallions, and radishes … and calendula (marigolds – for pest control, eating, and beauty). Even though I feel fairly certain I will be safe planting things the first week in March (and the meteorologist from the LCRA agrees with me about spring coming early), that still seems so far off! I want to be planting and tending things now … not mining in soggy soil for pebbles! Well, I guess I’ll just have to wait, won’t I?
Time to eat a little lunch, decide what to thaw for dinner, return some phone calls I missed while out in the rain, and then back to picking pebbles out of dirt. I’d really like to get done with that today. Then it can rain really hard on the bed tonight, which will bring any large pebbles I missed to the surface and give me a good idea about low areas in the bed and whether or not I need to add any more dirt (I don’t know that I need to, but I want to).
And I am not complaining about the rain. We need it so badly. Living in the middle of a severe drought zone sucks. More rain is OK with me. Makes my life a little more miserable, but having another summer like last year with almost no rain at all is pretty miserable too.
Footnotes- † Really, looking at photos of other people’s dirt has helped me see that my dirt is just fine. Better than a lot of other people’s dirt, and they have perfectly find gardens. This one is a good example. There are nowhere NEAR that many pebbles in my garden bed. I really do over think and over do and work everything to death, don’t I? Gah! [↩]