Gardening Journal

Today I went back to Daryll's place to finish uprooting the plants. It was lightly drizzling when I reached, but thankfully the rain stopped when I was done setting up.

The last few plants were not easy to uproot; the wet clay soil didn't help things along either. While digging, I realised something - water was rising through the ground as I dug. For a moment, I thought it was water from the slope behind the house, but then on closer inspection, I realised that the gardener Daryll's mom hired did a really lousy job of laying the garden. Beneath the beautiful loam which was so deceptively laid out was a bed of hard, sticky red clay. What the gardener did was just spread loam over the top without even bothering to dig through the clay. The clay was so sticky, I could actually fashion a crude vase/cup/bowl/receptacle-thing from it.

To doctor the situation, we called the guy back to dig up the plot, but he didn't turn up. He said he'll come tomorrow morning. I hope he does a through job this time. What he's supposed to do now is simply dig about 2' into the ground and heave the topsoil up, leaving it to dry and crack in the sun before we work the organic material in.

Also, to add to the one bag of steer manure and compost I had purchased earlier, we bought another 3 bags of compost to bolster the our earth conditioning efforts.