Spring Gardening Season Gets Off to Rather Exhausting Start

Our dog Sadie has been bad. She keeps digging in the garden. It’s time to plant potatoes. But I knew if I planted them, she’d just dig them up. So I built an electric fence around the garden last weekend.

I went into the woods and cut four good cedar posts to set at the corners. It’s such a pain in the butt to hook the auger to the tractor. It usually takes two or three people – one person to jiggle the controls on the tractor and two others to line up the attachment points.

I only needed to dig four post holes, so at first I opted for the old hand-digger. Our place near Cozy Corner is mostly sand and gravel. For the first hole, I got lucky and struck sand.

“This isn’t so bad,” I thought.

Then I started on the second hole and hit nothing but gravel. More like bull rock. That’s when my PTSD from the last time I hand-dug a post hole kicked in. So many angry thoughts rushed through my head.

“Why am I even doing this?”

“Should I just get rid of the dog?”

“I wonder how much this gravel is worth?”

“Where can I buy some dynamite?”

“Maybe I should just turn this place into a gravel pit.”

About that time I decided to hook up the auger.

Of course, I tried doing it myself first. I played the game of crawling onto the tractor, lifting the three-point arms a half an inch, crawling down the tractor, notice I’m an inch too high now, crawl back up the tractor, rinse and repeat.

This went on for about a half hour before I called my wife and son for help. I should have done that to begin with.

Now with the auger hooked to the tractor, I went back to the second hole. When you use an auger to dig a hole in gravel, you end up with more of a crater than a hole. But alas, I set that post and the two others without too much extra difficulty.

The entire time, Sadie played in the garden, digging around here and there just because I was working nearby.

I strung up three wires and energized them. I watched with great satisfaction as Sadie paced around the outside, not daring to touch the wire. She knows what it is.

Broken and tired, I managed to plant my seed potatoes. Such was the beginning of my spring gardening season.