Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Soil Sifting

Oh, god, please let this be the most tedious part of gardening.

I'm in the midst of sifting all the rocks from the soil in my backyard. I made my own soil sifter with some 1/2 inch hardware cloth ($7 a yard?!?!) and a dresser drawer I found on the street. (On a side note, there are certain things which you can always find in the garbage in New York City; mattresses, broken arm chairs and sofas... and dressers.)

So now I'm going through the slow and rather painstaking process of tossing a few shovels full of dirt into the sifter, scraping dirt through, then periodically emptying it of rocks. Shovel, sift, repeat.

This is going to take me all week. But hopefully this will be the worst part and it'll all be downhill (and rock free) gardening from here.

2 comments:

Erica said...

Congratulations! You now possess the basic skills of an archaeologist. And you didn't even need a billion years of school.

Shyaporn said...

And I'm actually excavating things and theorizing as to how they got there! Pieces of china, old dog bones (I hope), metal spikes, odd mechanical bits, coal, etc...

Actually my theory only consists of thinking they got the dirt from construction site fill somewhere, but you never know.