Dig, plant, dig, pry
It was so warm and beautiful that I decided to plant lettuce and spinach, cool-weather veggies that I usually put in too late in the Spring. Not this year. I took some horse manure, mixed it with the existing soil and planted three big containers.
The closest in the picture is all spinach. The smaller middle one is Buttercrunch lettuce plus a few hardy red leafy somethings that survived the winter. The farthest away has the Mesclun Mix that includes those red leafy things too. This is by far the earliest I've every planted anything. We'll see how it goes.
Ready to take on more I started digging a narrow trench across the back of the garden, near where the tomatoes were two years ago. Not surprisingly I hit quite a few 8-10" rocks, pieces of rusty steel and old bricks, all from the house that had once stood on this land.
As I dug further to the east I began hitting bigger rocks. Two I dug and pulled out. One was so entrenched I decided to leave it alone. Then there was another.
It became the whale to my Captain Ahab. Long after I realized I should have just left it in the ground I decided it had to come out. I even had my harpoon, a six-foot "spud bar" that you see in the picture.
It took close to an hour of digging and prying to get the rock in the lower right of the picture out of the trench. It's close to a foot thick and really didn't want to be disturbed.
But in this case Ahab got his whale. The rock is out now, and the trench that will tomorrow be planted with peas is filled with more horse manure, peat moss and soil. I'll probably be sore tomorrow.
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