Edging the Garden.

I called this part of my day edging the garden, mostly because I have no idea what I just did was really called. Also, I have really, really bad sunburn now. Anyway I spent the better part of today lining the edges of the garden with newspaper and swearing.

First off, because I am lazy and waited too long, I had to hoe the goddamned motherfucking grass back from the edges. Along with a bunch of other weeds whose roots appear to shoot straight to the center of the earth. Then I would slap some wet newspaper on that spot, shovel some thing on the top of it to hold it down, and call it done. Until the next section.

Of course that morning I had already been stabbed in the ball of my left thumb by a cherry tree, and had spent most of the previous night being woken up repeatedly by the dog because there was a thunderstorm. This involved him climbing into the bed with me, worming under the covers and then trying to dig through the bed and into the mattress which must have had some form of thunder protection I was not aware of. Of course this was highly distracting. Not only was I trying to sleep, but I knew Scott had an early morning for work. Unfortunately between the thunder and horrible ripping sounds from the center of the bed, I was not getting any sleep.

I ended up holding the dog in my office during the worst of the storm, when he alternated between shaking with fear and pacing around the room like an old British detective. Who was also a dog. Then I got the bright idea to check the weather and found out the storms were going to go on ALL NIGHT. Which is when I tricked Jack into running into his crate and then I shut the door and went to bed. Then I kind of felt like a dick.

So after thumb stabbing no sleep time, I gathered up my tools, a bucket of water and a crap ton of newspaper and hit the garden. Where I promptly got a blister on my right hand. You know, to even out the pain. After having all those thoughts about quitting, and thinking gardening is stupid and that weeds are the demons of the earth and that I wished that I had enough money to make someone else do this, I settled into a nice rhythm.

I would rake a section clear of ground cover, hoe out any weeds* I saw, wet the newspaper and lay it on the ground in a maneuver I dubbed, Garden Paper Mache. Well I was chugging along when I became aware of two things simultaneously. One, since it had rained, there were earthworms everywhere and two, my chickens really wanted to eat them. Except the only areas to get earthworms were in the areas I was raking and digging up. Which meant that for every three sheets I would lay down, the chickens would tear off one. Which meant I would have to shoo them away and fix it.

Which worked about as well as you would think.

The next part was pretty much exactly like one of those video games where you have to race around killing things as they try to get into your base. Except in this case my base was a bunch of newspapers and my enemies were chickens. So basically I played about five levels of tower defense in real life. With chickens.

Now I knew I had to get them out of there, but there was a problem. A problem in that all of the garden gates were damaged in the mega snow storm we had gotten and we have been unable to fix them yet because shit just kept on breaking. So I did the only thing I could do I went on an exploratory mission and brought back every stray roll of fencing wire I could find and then shove it up, under or across the gates.

Problem solved!

Except getting back into the garden was a pain in the ass and then I got lazy with the fence and a chicken got in and then I had to chase her back out and now they all distrust me and I had to jam metal T stakes through the wire to make half a gate because otherwise they would slip in through the bottom and then I would be fucked.

Then I was able to work in peace and I got it done while the chickens watched me from the other side of the fence and said stuff to me in chicken which I didn't really understand but I think was insults of some kind.

Which is, pretty normal around here, actually.

* Did I say any weeds? I meant all the weeds. All the weeds.