Back Yard Drama

Once upon a time, we decided to make a garden. So simple, we thought, to plant some tomatoes and then have them to eat all summer, warm and red from the sun and pulled right off the vine, explosive and juicy, instead of making one's way through traffic to a cold blue grocery store to pay money for cold, waxy tomatoes with tacky little stickers on them instead. It's not hard to understand our motivation. We also wanted peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini and herbs. So Nate's dad came over with some kind of riding tiller tractor thingy (I'm no farmer, but I speak the language) and tilled our chosen spot. And what did we find but rocks eight inches under the surface of the earth? Rocks, we surmised, no big deal. We'll move them. I don't know if you people know anything about limestone, but I didn't realize that the strangely square stone we uncovered (maybe two feet square, seven inches deep) would weigh somewhere between 700-900 pounds. I found this fact out as Nate and I pried it up and pulled it out and dragged it across the yard on a dolly. Feeling proud of ourselves, we proceeded to get on with the tasks of pre-garden gardening. Alas, what should appear before our eyes as we worked but another gargantuan and mysterious half-ton limestone chunk under the dirt every time we tried to dig a shovel-full of dirt, eventually displaying that there were TWELVE MORE under there, scattered without any discernible pattern except for two neat, even rows in the back. We continued moving dirt, and continued finding rock. As it turns out, the entire section of yard we had tilled to create our fabulous garden was at one point in history a patio of limestone, created by unknown persons for completely mystifying reasons since it's not near the house and is surely older than the house. We persisted and dug them all out and got a week's worth of exercise dragging them across the yard. We successfully excavated six rocks total, (ok, Nate and his dad moved the last and largest one, the one I'm standing on in the picture and that weighs an easy thousand pounds. I do have my limits) and left the remaining seven that were fairly even in the back. We've got plenty of room to garden around them, and we're sort of hoping that water will drain onto them from the rest of the garden since water tends to pool all over the yard when it rains. The rest of the stones are now either deposited landscapily around the yard or are in a useless pile. Pearl is perfectly content with us leaving them in a pile in the back yard, although I don't know how the landlords will feel about that. The happy ending to this story is that I did finally plant tomatoes and peppers yesterday, getting them all in the ground just at that time of evening that lightening bugs would have been appearing to twinkle if they were born yet, which they are not. My attachment to this garden may be as excessive as it already is because of the ridiculous amount of work that has already gone into it. After I planted them all I drew a diagram of the garden, giving each plant a number and writing a key wherein each number corresponds with the variety name of the plant, for the purpose of knowing which plants we want to plant again next year and which ones we don't like. But I've found myself calling the plants by their numbers, such as "twelve looks like it needs water," or "three looks like it's already grown." This kind of attachment can only lead to sadness and I know it, but for right now things look good. I'll keep you posted.