Rock Bottom to the Pinnacle:

Unearthing a Purple Fortune

Snowdiculous is what my beloved called Tuesday's Tax Day snowstorm.  Just Monday, I was planting beets, turnips and carrots in the garden in Daisy Duke shorts, and praying for rain.  Got it.  Plus a little snow.  That does look ridiculous on the green grass and at the hem of the neighbor's woods just now tinged with the green hues of opening leaf buds.  Every flat of plants -- broccoli to leeks, pak choi, peppers and tomatoes -- is crowding the plant stand and spilling over onto the floor nearby, waiting out the cold temperatures and the interruption of planting season.

My fig tree reinvigorated.

Plant traffic jam

The spring snow reminds me of our first full week of dwelling on the farm.  We had come for a visit on Easter break ahead our moving date in June.  We arrived on the farm on a warming trend.  The girls, David and I spilled out onto the land, David and the girls building a tree-house in the granddaddy sugar maple tree while I pruned the grape arbor and took my first turn at gardening.  I remember the popsicles the girls sucked on that hot Tuesday afternoon, watching thunderclouds build and sail over the farm.  The mountainous clouds marked a front bringing a curtain of cold air and snow the next day, weather so like what we are experiencing today.  I laugh at the stuff I didn't know back then.

When we took possession of the farm the previous autumn, we used the new keys to open the locked rooms of the barn, finding yellowed cattle vaccination charts, ancient coffee cans heavy with sharp roofing nails, and sturdy tools hanging on nails in the wall or propped upright.  I had fingered through the pitchforks and rock rakes in the barn, finding familiar implements --a sledgehammer, a hatchet, a spade, a flat-bottomed shovel -- along with old metal tools with worn wooden handles I had never used -- a hay hook, calf castrating equipment and a pick axe.  What the heck was a  pick axe doing in this lush haven?  But wait, there was another pick axe.  Why two? 

My first day in the garden, I had a sinking realization of why the pick axes rested dusty in the old barn tool room.  Breaking up soil clods that David had turned over with a potato plow, I spaded the chunks into a finer-grained substrate to plant lettuce, spinach and purple potatoes in.  As I worked my way energetically down the first row of the bed, I hopped on my spade, putting all of my weight through my tennis-shoed foot on the curled metal top of the blade.  A few feet in, my spade smacked into a solid rock with a dull "chunk!"  Used to sinking into the soil, I lost my balance and tipped over. No problem.  I scootched my spade over a few inches and tried again.  Chunk!  Hmmm.  I scootched over a foot.  Chunk!  Another foot over.  Chunk! Oh *$#@! My heart raced as I fretted that the entire garden was nothing but bedrock with a thin soil frosting!  

Just then, David walked by, and pointed out places in the garden where the plow had sunk so deep, it made the tractor tires spin, saying what a shame it was that I had picked the one place in the garden that had a rock under it to start my work.  I was overreacting to a rock.  I continued at a mellower pace.  When I got done with my archaeological unearthing, I had revealed a 5' by 3' slab of rock that I could not move.  A first experience for me and a valuable start in my lessons in humility. 

I laughed Sunday, just thinking of those pick axes, and that mammoth rock, for I dug a 2' by 3' hole only a foot or so deep off the north porch of the house to set a water garden in.  I had planned to scoop the organic soil around the sides of the plastic mortar pan, and use the soil hummocks to plant flowers and hostas in.  Nope.  As I sunk my spade in for the first bite of soil, I found the thinnest veneer of organic soil clutched tightly by a mat of grass roots, and beneath that, chunks of gravel- to cobble- to stepping-stone-sized rocks.  I peeled back the sod, saving it to patch a dip in the yard, and hucked the little stones to the driveway.  The stepping stones serve nicely around the water garden.  Luckily, I didn't need a pick axe. 

Stones and water create an oasis.

Sunday evening, David and I sat on the porch and admired the beauty of moving water in the little water garden as the sun set on a gorgeous spring day.  A ring of stepping stones stood out amid the dark compost I hauled from the compost pile and poured around the pond to plant into.  The water burbled musically, and I could imagine the shasta daisies, blanket flowers and foxgloves I seeded in flats last week nodding on a summer breeze as David and I shared lunch in our favorite summertime lunch spot.  

I never know what lies under the soil -- smooth digging or chunky rocks-- but I find there is always something useful -- stepping stones, lessons in humility, even just driveway gravel -- if I can step back, regain faith and try again.  When we persevere, we win.  

That immovable rock remains majestically resting just where I found it, where the eons will find it when I am long gone.  Even the tractor couldn't budge it.  We unearthed another rock similar to it in a nearby bed.  And David hauled that giant rock out of the garden with the tractor and towed it to the greenhouse where it forms a solid stone stoop that catches the sun's warmth.  (That's what those big chains in the barn were for!) 

We have found other similarly massive monoliths in our digging on Hawk's Hill.  We now have a collection along the driveway that we hope to use for sidewalk stones, as pieces of rock walls, as stone bench sets.  I might just use one as a mammoth stepping stone around my new water garden.  Do you know how much money it would cost me to buy a rock that big?  A purple fortune!  Who knew my spade was biting into a purple fortune that day I was so hot under the collar with my haughty approach to a country problem.  

May the chunky part of your day turn over a purple fortune in treasure.
Betsy

Wishing all of you who celebrate it a blessed Easter.