Gardening with Axes and Sledgehammers

June 11th, 2019

   Back in my Cumberland County garden, I’d improved the soil so well over 30 years that I scarcely needed even a trowel to plant.

Trying to pound stakes into the ground with a smaller sledgehammer after whacking my finger with a bigger one.

   The ground was so loose I could open holes with my fingers.

   Not so in my new Pittsburgh “landscape.”

   The soil here is a dense, back-achingly heavy, poorly drained black goop, pock-marked with rocks.

   It doesn’t help that the previous owners never went outside, leading to barrel-sized clumps of seeded-in miscanthus grass everywhere, rampant seedlings of rose-of-sharon, and roots like I haven’t seen since watching the Jurassic Park film.

   I now find myself gardening not with trowels and rakes but with axes and sledgehammers.

   This is more battle than coddle, and my shed seems to be more an arsenal of weapons than a home for yard-crafting implements.

   Other than a lot of aches and muscle cramps, I’ve managed not to do any serious damage to myself or the property during renovation. This is, until I got to the point of attempting to install raised beds for a vegetable garden.

   I was trying to pound 2-by-2-inch stakes in the ground to secure my boards and keep them from warping, but they weren’t going into the rocky, dense goop very well.

   So I resorted to the new, long-handled, eight-pound sledgehammer that I had bought to drive metal sleeves into the ground for my deer-fence posts (another story of Pittsburgh adversity for another day).

   You can probably guess what happened. I somehow got my left index finger in the way of the business end of the hammer, and my finger came out the loser.

   Seven stitches and an ER visit to Forbes Hospital later, I was side-tracked into a safer job – painting the arbor gates. It’s much harder to hurt yourself with a paint brush.

A side effect of gardening in Pittsburgh.

   If this dreadful excuse for soil ever dries out, I’m hoping to start improving it with eight yards of compost from the borough leaf-recycling program.

   I’m also working in store-bought bags of compost, planting mix, and mushroom soil as I start to replant the cleared and reclaimed spots.

   This is a lot of work – an effort I thought I’d already taken care of years ago at my previous home. But it’s either that or lose a lot of plants to root-rot.

   Digging was much easier at age 35 or even age 55.

   Assuming all heals well from the sledgehammer incident, at least I’ll have all 10 fingers to share in the work.