Weeding.

Best-Friend-Hannah (hereafter "BFH") and I set out to weed and plant our plot on the Saturday morning after it was given to us. I owned, more out of cheapness than ignorance, two spades and a tiny, functionally useless rake-like thing which I bought the day before at CVS. This day was when we had our first encounters with our garden plot neighbors. Only one of the plots next to us was planted, but it had enough lush, well tended vegetation for an acre. Most of it was even recognizable by its species, as opposed to the anonymous little green wisps of adjacent plots.

This person could be a very good resource, I hoped. Unfortunately, the gift of gardening seemed to come at the price, for her, of an inability to communicate with other humans. As BFH and I sweated in the ever increasing heat bent double and pulling rangy weeds she refused to respond to greetings or even make eye contact except to stare pointedly at me when my foot came too near one of the bricks she had installed as a walkway (read: barrier) between our two plots. In fact, the weedy overgrown mess on the other side of us was much more useful, as it served as a good place to unceremoniously hurl the weeds we pulled out. Just as plentiful as the weeds were rocks ranging from thumb to fist-sized. We considered hurling those into the vacant plot as well, but ours was so rocky that we thought maybe it had been the target of everyone who weeded before us. As BFH put it, "last one to start weeding's a rotten egg."

So instead we used them to build a rock-line at the edge of our plot so we didn't weed a single inch more than necessary. The plot is about six feet across and twenty feet long. It was much larger than I had expected. There were still considerable leftover rocks, so we built some divisions within the garden, too. It actually turned out quite attractive, but the fact remained that after a full 4 hours of work two thirds were not cleared and the other third was growing rocks.