I’m almost done with the second section of the trench for the hedge. This one ends in a corner that seems to have been a dumping ground for large rocks when the garden was first landscaped. If they had just been another ten or twenty centimetres deeper, I wouldn’t have touched them, but now the earth above them is so shallow that I decided they really needed to come out. Over the decades, the earth around the rocks has become super compacted (because of pressure from all sides, I guess) and I can barely get the edge of the spade in. Digging is replaced by hacking and prying.