Back-Breaking Work of Staggering Tedium

My bulbs and seeds arrived, and I had what I needed to construct the vegetable bed. Just one small hitch.

The ground around the vegetable bed was so solid that I would never be able to knock in the log-roll properly. I would have to break up a trench before I could make the veg bed. Not to mention digging out the unwanted shrub growing right where the back edge of the bed would go.

I also knew from Operation Lawn Resue that stuff will not grow in hard-packed earth, so the flower-bed would have to be dug over as well. When we'd removed the ivy from the base of the pear-tree way back in January, I'd found that much of the flower-bed was packed with stray gravel from the patio. The roses don't seem to mind it, but I wasn't sure that bulbs or primroses, or anything else, would be at all happy in stony ground, so I would have to get it all out. Which would mean sieving the loosened soil once I'd done the digging.

Can't say I was looking forward to any of it, but it had to be done, and happily, we've had about a fortnight now without rain, so I just got on with it as best I could. It hasn't helped that, as it turns out, we don't really have topsoil.
No.

What we have is actually rubble, covered in mud, held together by weed roots.

As well as the gravel, the flower bed contained a large amount of debris, presumably from the building of the retaining wall and the underpinning. There might be an argument that some of it was left there to help with the drainage - if it wasn't for the sheer volume and variety of stuff I've been digging up.

By the middle of last week, there was a predictable and monotonous pattern to the job:

Plunging of fork into ground more in hope than expectation, followed by a sickening crunch reminiscent of the tackle that ended Danny Thomas's career, accompanied by a response more usually applied when hearing the words "BAE Systems" "Al Yammamah" and "scandal" in the same sentence ("Oh, for the love of God! WTF is it this time..?"). Then ten minutes or so of wiggling and heaving the fork in order to loosen up the area enough to dig out the offending item(s). Repetition of whole process one fork width to the left.

In spite of the frustration of what should have been a relatively straightforward job turning into some kind of nightmare archaelogical dig, it's actually been weirdly enjoyable, possibly because it's not so many years since I would have been completely physically incapable of it.

And it's still less of a chore than reading David Eggers.