Compulsive digging

Flower & Garden Magazine, March-April, 1997 by Doug Hall

Anyone who saw my back yard in early March would think I was dealing with a serious gopher infestation. Pocked with craters and randomly dotted with mounds of soil, the scene looks more like a battleground than a garden.

It isn't the handiwork of giant rodents. It's my own doing: I'm anxious for spring, and when I'm restless I tend to dig.

It's too early to prune the roses, after all, and most planting chores are still a month away. Other outdoor jobs, like removing winter mulch, also must wait for warmer weather. If I were to clean up the perennial garden now, hauling the protective mulch to the compost pile and exposing tender tufts of foliage, frigid nights would return to punish my impatience.

Despite the cold nights, March days can be warm. Shirtsleeve temperatures, a hint of the season to come, lure me outdoors. I need to purge my lungs of stale indoor air. So I reach for the shovel, and I dig.

I'm fortunate to live where soil preparation is possible in late winter. In many regions the soil is either frozen solid now or is a muddy quagmire. But here in the Midwest, meager snowfalls combine with occasional sunny days and dry, sweeping winds to leave the soil workable -- at least in the exposed areas of the yard.

If I have to be compulsive about a garden task, it might as well be one with long-term benefits. My soil is clay, and while it is naturally deep, it is dense and low on organic matter. Frequent, generous additions of organic materials do wonders for its structure and fertility. My compost pile can't keep up with the demand for this homemade soil amendment, so I buy alternatives: rotted manure, peat moss, pulverized pine bark and cotton bur compost. The organic treatment makes my heavy soil looser, more porous to both water and air.

Soil preparation is hard work. Many gardeners consider it to be not nearly as much fun as planting, so they try to get by with halfhearted attempts. That's a mistake; the difference may not show at first, but when the sweltering days of July arrive, the rewards of good soil are evident. Well-prepared soil that has been enriched with organic matter and fertilizer stimulates plants to send their roots deep and wide. Plants grown on such soil are healthier and more vigorous, better able to resist disease and better prepared to deal with heat and drought.

With that lush dividend in mind, I can spend hours digging. Wherever I'm reasonably certain that no bulbs or perennials are lurking below the surface, I dig deeply, burying kitchen scraps and mixing in my organic amendments. Double digging, a labor-intensive technique recommended in countless garden books but rarely put into practice, is the rule in my garden. Pink-cheeked from exertion, I dig until my back begs for mercy.

The lawn is fair game for digging, too. When you garden on an urban lot, as I do, space is at a premium, turf must make way for anything more interesting. If I go wild buying seeds of a dozen varieties of lettuce that I've never tried before, the lawn yields space for the new salad patch. If I order more roses than the existing garden can support, the lawn again shrinks.

There's plenty of ground to be dug in late winter; the shovel gets a real workout.

And then one unseasonably sunny morning I step out the kitchen door to find a patch of snow crocuses in bloom. Their tiny white blossoms, nestled among dark leaves as narrow as grass, spangle the ground like stars. Just like that, it's spring -- announced not with a raucous fanfare of tulips but with the whispered beauty of humble crocuses.

There will still be freezing nights, and perhaps even a bit of snow, but winter's will is broken. My attention turns from preparation to planting, the crocuses say it is spring.