The gardening miracle

IT’S CLEARLY spring as the sun shines and unpredictable April showers pepper Arkansas. In the cycle of life, spring represents a rebirth of what died off during the winter. At least that’s what you might believe if you’re into that life-is-poetry stuff. Farmers’ markets are starting up, too. And baseball is in the air.

One of our friends called us over to the sprawling city of Dover, Ark., to help get a rain garden going last weekend, so on a wet but warming Sunday, we loaded up a bag of potting soil and a pair of Dollar Tree’s finest purple gardening gloves. The adventure would be messy, but the best ones usually are.

What we dreaded most wasn’t necessarily the muddy ground. It was what lay in wait under all that mud.

Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of digging in Arkansas knows what rests just beneath the surface. Some may have driven posts into the ground for a new cattle fence. We can certainly remember trying to bury some sort of fancy wire around the backyard that would activate electric prongs on our dogs’ collars and keep them within the desired boundary. (It didn’t work.)

When you jam a shovel into western Arkansas soil, you’re likely to hear a CHING! sound and realize you’ve struck rock. If you move a few feet left or right and try again, you’ll probably have the same result. There are countless numbers of rocks underneath our

ground in this much-too Natural State, and for reasons only geologists can understand, digging is difficult around here.

We once heard talk of a home built into the side of a mountain near Vilonia. They had to use explosives to blast into the hill. Thankfully, this wasn’t an issue for us last Sunday morning. We got out the shovel and dug. And dug. And dug some more. We didn’t run into many rocks at all. It must have been some kind of gardening miracle! There was plenty of clay, sure. But clay is manageable. Rocks are not.

And while many of the folks over at the state Farm Bureau will tell you seven ways from Monday that rice and soybeans are some of our state’s biggest crops, we’d argue the No. 1 thing our state produces is rocks. Dang things make digging downright difficult.

But that wasn’t our fate on Sunday. We dug into the earth a few inches, cleared out all that dirt and put down a layer of potting soil. Then we threw in all manner of plants scrounged together—irises, daffodils, hostas and more— before putting down a layer of black mulch to finish it all off.

With the rain garden finished, we retired to the living room where our friends had made pizza to thank everyone for the hard work. We’re not sure if we have green thumbs, but they were certainly black and blue after all that shovel work.