It’s always a mixed feeling for me to do things like dig up a garden plot. On the one hand it’s necessary, on the other hand by the time I’m done I hurt so much that I can’t help but think of all the other things I needed to do.

Ideally the right way to do this is to get a rototiller and dig up the whole thing. At least I think that’s the right way to do it, I’ve never actually checked to see if there was more than one way to do it, and it’s what I’ve seen done elsewhere. However I don’t have a rototiller and I had to wait a while until I could buy a new shovel, so rototilling my garden is out of the question. Although I suppose I could bribe one of my garden plot neighbors to do it with their rototiller.

Anyway with the problems I have in my back, I’ve toyed with a few different ideas of how to go about digging the trenches.  One way I’ve thought doing it is by growing the seeds to plants, I think they’re called seedlings at that point, but it’s a guess on my part, and just digging a small hole per plant and planting the seedling and leaving the rest of the garden as grass.

This is probably what I should have done, back-wise.

The pros that I can think of are:

• It’s easy on my back
• It minimizes effort (why dig up areas that are just going to sit there with nothing)
• It leaves plenty of grassy areas to walk on without getting needlessly muddy.

The  cons I can think of are:

• The grass and weeds will compete with my new plants for nutrients
• The grass and weeds would encroach on my plants thus causing much weeding to be done
• It’s possible that the weeds and grass could put toxins in the soil to reduce competition and prevent my plants from growing well, or growing at all

 

Instead I chose to dig partial rows. This means I dug part of a row, skipped a walking-path sized section and finished the row. Then I skipped a walking-path sized section and dug two more partial rows.

The pros that I can think of are:

• It’s easier on my back than digging up the entire plot
• It reduces effort (it has some areas that are dug needlessly, but a lot is left alone)
• It still leaves plenty of grassy areas to walk on without getting needlessly muddy.

The  cons I can think of are pretty much the same as above, but I’ll list them again:

• The grass and weeds will compete with my new plants for nutrients
• The grass and weeds would encroach on my plants thus causing much weeding to be done
• It’s possible that the weeds and grass could put toxins in the soil to reduce competition and prevent my plants from growing well, or growing at all
• It actually looks kind of dumb

It seems to me that I had a third idea (or a fourth idea if you count bribing someone who has a rototiller) but I can’t recall what it was offhand.