So of the many fatal flaws in my plan(s), my gardening layout is one of them. As you may recall, I chose short-ish rows and columns so it looked kind of like a table you might see on a computer screen, only less neat and more disorderly.

I did this in order to minimize the amount of work back pain I would (and did) encounter whilst digging as I had nothing more than a shovel to dig with much less any way of getting something over to the community garden where my plant cemetery garden plot is. You can see the end result in the photo.

Garden Plot Layout Issues

It’s been a week or two since I went and turned the rows over, I’ve got about two more articles to write to get “caught up” on this blog. So let me tell you about some of the things I’ve encountered.

Guess what? Grass grows.

I gave a great deal of thought to the fact that I would not have to stomp on mud in-between my rows, what I did not give a great deal of thought to was the grass and weeds in-between those rows. With all the rain we’ve been having they’ve been growing like, well, weeds. In some places it is almost knee high.

Initially my concern was that the grass would encroach upon my rows, the height of the grass never entered into my thought process. In summer it won’t be a big issue, but for now it contributes to the muddy and wet legs of my pants and shoes.

It also makes it more annoying to work in the rows themselves. They bend over into the rows and stay in the way. Yes I could bend them back over out of the way, but I’m writing about the issues I’ve run into.

The grass is always greener

My non-mud, grassy walkways did not stay grassy for long. Every time I worked in the plot I have dirt (which is more like a clay consistency here) and mud fall into the walkways and I could not scrape it all off.

The result is about what you would expect, there’s a few spots that are grassy, some that are dirty, and others that are just plain muddy. Yuck.

Here a clod, there a clod

Not specific to my particular design is all the root clumps which quite frankly, I thought would break apart much quicker and easier than they did. However I was unable to sort through and pull them out. Partially because of my back (I did the digging first) and partially because of the weather, but I also just plain ran out of time. You can read about that in my next post: Planting the Seeds of Despair (coming soon)

That’s it for now folks, stay tuned to find out about my mistakes with seeds.