Sharpen Your Shovel
And don't tempt the fates...
I declared victory in mid-May: I had wrapped up all of my gardening projects for the year.
Wisely, I limited myself to transforming a single garden bed. I made a plan, went to one plant sale, stuck to my list, stayed on budget, and had everything in the ground that same weekend.
As befits any epic story, the gods heard me boasting and decided to correct my hubris.
Last fall, the spousal unit started a yard drainage project to address the "a river runs through it" situation in our garage. We hit a work stoppage when aggressive digging met important tree roots.
This summer, in addition to the standard-issue overwhelm of a midwestern summer, this “quick and easy” project turned into a months-long ordeal that is, finally, nearing its completion.
This project has required digging, preparing, and planting a 14' by 6' (about 4 m by 2 m) rain garden and digging and contouring nearly 100’ (about 30 m) of trenching. With “only” re-grading the yard, replacing the lawn, planting another 50-something erosion-control plants around the garage, and disposing of the last few tons of dirt to go, the finish line is in sight.
The long and short of this is that yours truly has spent many, many hours with a wide variety of shovels shifting literal tons of dirt.
The most useful piece of advice I had on the project was not or given as advice or in the context of this project.
A few years back, I was at a hardware store with my dad and he bought me a file saying it was to sharpen my shovels.
Prior to that moment, it had never occurred to me that shovel sharpening was a thing.
I made a home for the file on the peg board behind my gardening bench and didn't do anything with it for a year or so.
Then I had some shrubs to plant. I started digging, and it sucked. I remembered the shovel-sharpening file and gave it a try.
I was an immediate convert to this piece of Dad-wisdom: more result with less effort.
Needless to say, while digging up about 6 tons of our heavy clayey soil, you'd better believe every last shovel we own met with that file. My breaks from digging consisted of sitting in the shade, hydrating, and restoring the edge to my shovel.
And with that simple act, my work was made easier. Not easy, mind, but easier.
Getting to the finish line was always gong to require an incredible amount of labor, but the simple tweak of taking a file to the end of my my shovels meant that I didn't have to put in quite so much work to get there.
What "shovel" would you do well to sharpen?