Remind me again of that phrase I can never remember

Displacement activity. That's the one.



As you can see, I have a whole new vegetable bed to dig over.

As you can see, I have made small headway thus far.

I wonder how many shovelfuls I have ahead of me? And how long it will take for all that vile creepy grass to break down into healthful humus, and how many trips to the town dump meanwhile for civic compost, and what I should actually grow in it once it's ready for, y'know, actual growing...

Meanwhile, I should go and dig another row. As my alternatives are worrying about stuff and/or feeding a pill to Barry, I think I'd rather be digging.

I wonder...

...how much 24 cubic feet of turf-and-soil might weigh?

That being the approximate volume that I have dug and turned this evening. (What, did you doubt my geek credentials? Of course I counted, of course I measured: ten spadefuls per row of a hundred inches, thirty-six inches back, to a depth of little less than a foot. And I should probably be double-digging, but I'm not.)

Oddly, I had been thinking that I've never done this before and I don't really know what I'm doing - but actually I have. When we lived in a cottage on a farm outside Carlisle thirty years ago, I turned half the lawn into vegetable patch. And I must certainly have done the digging myself, but I have no memory of that at all.

Liveblogging the improvement

Aaaand now I have a large gin with not too much tonic and a lime fresh off John's tree, and things are somewhat better than they were. I'm not really supposed to drink at this time of day unless I'm working - but hell, I'm reading Kipling, and that is still so absolutely work, I defy anyone to deny it. Iss fai!