![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_3\/2023_earthworm.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI keep digging. And I keep rediscovering techniques for getting through this clay. (I’ve done this before, after all, for the planting along the front of the house.) Shaving slivers off the untouched wall of soil works well, because then the chunk that I cut loose is thin enough to break up easily. The downside is that this risks killing a lot of earthworms. Cutting off larger chunks of earth is more work but spares the worms. When I break up the chunks, they tend to split along natural cracks, and the earthworms just sort of fall out, unharmed.<\/p>\n
Earthworms apparently spend sunny days resting, about 20 cm below the surface, curled up into what looks like a knot.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In a few spots I ran across soil that was packed so hard that even my body weight wasn’t enough to get the spade into the ground. It was clay mixed with gravel, and probably compacted by some kind of machinery. The weight of the soil above it, or the weight of a human, would not be enough to pack it so hard. It felt like trying to hack through concrete. Hacking at it with various tools and from various angles finally got me through it.<\/p>\n
You know what’s harder to dig through than clay? Large, rusted nails. Unrusted nails would probably be almost as bad, but I haven’t found any so I can’t compare. They might be slightly less work because they wouldn’t be so camouflaged. Unlike rocks, rusty nails don’t make a sound, and you can’t make out their shape and size with the tip of the spade. Unlike roots, you can’t hack through them. The spade just stops.<\/p>\n
People who throw building hardware into the soil in a garden deserve their own special circle in hell, where they have to dig through a patch of earth and pick out all the nails, and a demon walks behind them and makes new nails materialize in the soil that they’ve already dug through. Forever and ever.
\n![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_3\/2023_nails.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I keep digging. And I keep rediscovering techniques for getting through this clay. (I’ve done this before, after all, for the planting along the front of the house.) Shaving slivers off the untouched wall of soil works well, because then the chunk that I cut loose is thin enough to break up easily. The downside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,22,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-house_and_garden","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13214"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13218,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13214\/revisions\/13218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}