Chuff. Chuff chuff chuff. Chuff. That is the sound of a lawn being turned into a garden. A piece of sod is cut out and pryed up with a shovel. In our clay soil, even at the best state for digging, this square of earth is never going to break apart on its own.

So you flip it over and cut it into pieces with the shovel. And as the blade quickly cuts the soil into pieces, that is the sound it makes. Chuff. Chuff chuff chuff. Chuff. Robins approve of chuffing. They know you are breaking the sod so they can get those fat juicy earthworms. They start cautiously on the fence, then fly down to exactly a shovel and a half's length behind you on the ground, hunting and feasting and flying back to the nest with choice treats.

It's a pleasant sound. It's the sound of sunny days, sweat and steady progress. For all the books I'd read about landscaping before we bought this house, I had no real idea what the first step should be when it came time to start a garden where a lawn had been. I didn't know it would come down to chuffing, in the end.

I am all for lazy gardening and I had heard that if time is not of importance, you can take the square pieces of sod and stack them in a pile, roots up. They were supposed to rot over the course of a year, turning into lovely soft compost by next spring.

So that's what I did with the sod I removed to make room for a gravel path. My piles of sod turned into adobe walls with grass and weeds growing out the sides of them. So I had to again break them up into shovel-sized chunks and this time, I chuffed them. I should have thought about the Spanish adobe mission buildings that are over a hundred years old and still stand in this area today. I believe they were built by taking square pieces of clay sod, stacking them roots up and waiting about a year.

Slow though it may be, once clay has been chuffed into little pieces at least as small as peas and then has a healthy dose of organic matter worked into it to keep it light, it turns into very fertile garden soil. All that clay has lots of trace minerals often lacking in sandier, looser soils.

We did spend one very ugly day with a rented tiller, thinking that once we had at least removed the top layer of sod, we could work amendments into the rest of the 1800' square feet in one day. I saw strapping teen-agers doing this in the front yards of new housing tracts all the time as I drove by and it only took them a morning.

Ha! Steve made it much farther than I but we both admitted by lunch, that was it. And that was about half the yard done. The rest to this day is being slowly transformed when we can. It's been long enough ago that Steve has forgotten and is talking again about buying a small tiller but I still remember the muscle aches. Chuffing can be a bit tedious but it is also easy exercise and quiet. As sounds go, it beats a small engine any day.

Text and images Copyright 1998 Cyndi Kirkpatrick. All rights reserved