Isn’t that a lovely picture? Nothing like dirt clods to get the old heart racing, I always say. It’s part of a big gardening project I’ve undertaken while my husband is off on a trip to Central Asia. He’ll get back on Sept. 30th, and I thought it would be a good Idea for me to have some challenges of my own while he’s gone. This dirt pile represents one of those.

So, just to give you an idea, we have a walkout onto a brick patio at our home here in Littleton CO in the lower level of my in-laws’ house that’s about 36 feet wide. The area widens out to more like 50 feet at the ends of the big brick retaining walls, still in very good shape in this approximately 60-year-old house. So we have a fairly large area to play with, and let’s just say that not much has been done with this area in the 40+ years that the Simons family has occupied the house. I’m basically digging up soil that hasn’t been touched for decades, and I’m determined to turn the area right in front of the patio into a beautiful flowerbed. 200 tulip Bulbs will be arriving in the new few weeks, for one thing, and I need to prepare the ground. There will also be perennial and annual flowers in the bed, but those won’t get planted until next spring.

Last year, our first in the house, I also ordered several hundred Tulip Bulbs. (I love tulips! Can you tell!) I thought of the bulbs as an outer nudge to get me going on the bed. They arrived earlier than I had expected, as I remember, and I kept sort of gazing at the ground and thinking that Jim and I should really get busy, but somehow it never happened. (The tulip bulbs were my idea, not Jim’s, so they weren’t really his problem.) Finally I thought, ‘We don’t need to dig the whole area up. I’ll just get a good bulb planter.’ This was a bad idea for at least three reasons: 1) the whole area did need to be dug up if I was going to cover it with plantings, 2) if I tried to prepare the ground after planting the tulips I’d probably disturb the bulbs, and 3) I had no idea how hard the ground was and therefore didn’t know whether or not this technique would work. Blithely I set off for the garden center, coming home with a long, narrow trowel that broke when Jim tried to jam it into the cement-like ground. Back I went, this time getting an attachment for his drill that would make the holes that way. It did work–sort of. But the ground was so hard that the drill kept overheating and jamming, and Jim ended up spending a great deal of time digging dirt out by hand in order to get the planting holes deep enough. Honestly, I think we’d have spent less time just doing it the right way. (What a thought.) But the bulbs were all planted and I looked forward to the display this past spring It would abe worth it, I figured.

And was it? In a word, no. The tulips were very spindly, and a number of them didn’t come up at all. I think that the problem was that, even though we had made the holes nice and deep and also put bulb food at the bottom, the overall quality of the soil was just too poor. (Notice I say, “we had made the holes,” but in reality Jim made them. Hey, I bought the gadgets!) When I tried to dig up the bulbs so that I could save and re-plant them, I ended up destroying them. All that work (and money) for nothing!

So this year we’d do better, I thought. We’d have all summer to work on our overall landscaping, including my poor little flowerbed. Well, somehow the long, hot summer came and went, with no real digging being done, at least on my part. Jim and our friend Rob installed a French drain on the side of one retaining wall, and Jim ordered stone, lumber and mulch. He moved wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of stuff up from the street where it was delivered to the back yard. Once he gets back from his trip we should have at least a month of nice fall weather before winter hits to finish installing all of these materials. In the meantime, though, I’m determined to get the patio flowerbed prepped. My initial idea was that I’d spend two hours a day, early in the morning before it gets hot and sunny, digging up the soil, removing some of the clay, and adding amendments, mainly bagged compost. How much time have I really spent? Maybe an average of half an hour per day of actual digging. It’s pretty pathetic.

But you know what? I’m still making progress. Right now I have about 40% of the first pass done, digging out about the top four inches or so and putting it on the side. Then I want to dig out the next four inches and wheelbarrow it off to the side of the yard. Then I’ll mix in the compost with the saved dirt, breaking up the clods and making the whole bed smooth. Then I’ll add mulch. Once I’ve gotten the soil all lightened and smoothed I’ll need to be very careful not to step directly on the dirt, so I’ll walk on boards. At some point a flagstone path will be installed. And of course this is all just one little part of the overall project, which includes raised and rock beds held with landscape timbers. But that’s going to be Jim’s job. (I will be planting asparagus in one of the raised beds.)

As Samwise says in Lord of the Rings,  “It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” What about you? Is there some big undertaking that you just find too daunting to contemplate? Based on my current experience, I’d say, “Just get out the shovel and lever out that first load of dirt. It probably won’t be as bad as you think.”

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