Pissing off the earthworms

I turned over the vegetable garden. Started Sunday, donning shorts for the first time this year, having to adjust to showing my birchlike* calves again. Then it rained. Finished yesterday. It gets easier every year, and I like to think this year was especially (relatively) painless because of the time I've put in on the elliptical. I've learned things over the years: where the oak roots snake across, where the clay deposits are. You can get sunburned even in April. Don't try to pick up the pitchfork of dirt until you've levered it up by pushing the end of the handle down. (That may seem intuitive to everyone else, but my earlier pitchfork experience involved clean, careful lifts so as not to scatter the horse pooties...) Today I get to add peat moss, which I always mentally call "folding in" because it reminds me of adding whipped egg whites to a batter to make it fluffy.

Normally I swear by The Renegade Gardener and heed his advice to a decidedly non-Renegade degree. However, Sunday I broke one of the big ones, one of the Ten Commandments Tenets of Renegade Gardening: Gardening and rock music do not mix. Rock music is what's in my iPod, and while his sentiment, "The sound nature makes in your yard is the most relaxing accompaniment to gardening," is lovely, it does not account for barking dogs, chainsaws, University Avenue, the pissed-off chickadees fighting in the neighbor's arborvitae or — and this was the one that put me over the edge — having the Smurfberry Crunch song stuck in your head. It's berry red and smurfy blue! Didn't take me long to realize that my pitchfork action was starting to feel more and more like stabs of rage.

Last night Puck came out and put in landscape edging for me so the lawn won't encroach quite so much. (Yes, Landscapalooza attendees, until this year I hadn't practiced what I preached. Shame on me.)

And...I had to stop writing to do actual work, and now it's time to go home.

*Ghostly white and thick as tree trunks.