Today looked like an excellent rototillering day. We got a very light sprinkle overnight, the sun was shining, and no wind, I've been priming a bed right outside my front door, getting ready to plant it. For the past few weeks I've been shallowly flipping in all of my non-livestock edible garbage. Time to till!
This is the 6th or 7th time this specific area has seen the rototiller. So it's not like I've been using a shovel or digging it just hit & miss. But every time I till, the tiller complains about rocks. I faithfully remove each one the tiller finds. Yet still, here I am finding more rocks yet again. If I were back in New Jersey I'd be saying that frost heaves each winter were bringing more rocks to the surface. But that excuse simply doesn't carry weight here in Hawaii. Geez, you'd think that after 6 times through this bed I would have found all the rocks by now. Guess not. At least the rocks I'm finding are getting smaller.
But one asks, why do I keep finding rocks? No frost heaves. Nobody around here chucking rocks into the bed. And I remove rocks when I come across them. What else is going on? As one uncle told me as a kid, the rocks are reproducing....having baby rocks. Yes, back then I believed him. Egads, from an adult perspective, that means that they're have sex right under my very nose! Or maybe they are like yeasts, budding and subdividing. Cloned rocks? Could it be? Naw. But yet again......?????
By the way, all that added garbage made for a worm population explosion. At least SOMETHING is indeed having sex in my garden.
I had one of those rugged little Mantises, wearing it out in my war to clear rocks from the yard. The rocks eventually lost. But don't discount the other possibility, as menehune could be sneaking those rocks in to make hiding places for the worms...
ReplyDeletePersonally, I like the idea of menehune in the garden! One never knows what the nightlife is around here when you're asleep.
DeleteThis may spoil the fun but my theory is that soil life has softened the dirt around the rock enough so that where it would formerly uniformly resist the the teeth now they hook into the edges of the rock.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good explanation to me!
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