I was crawling along the garden beds, accomplishing two tasks at once: moving little rocks out of the newly cultivated area so I could sow the fall carrots, and securing the edge of the landscape fabric where the lettuce was growing. I had run out of the ground staples we usually use for the fabric, so the little rocks came in handy.
The farm pooch came to visit. “What'cha doing?” he asked.
I stopped my tasks long enough for a petting session. “Oh, just moving rocks from one place to another, in the strange way humans have,” I answered.
“Oh,” said the pooch, yawning, and going to take a nap in the shade.
Another day I was hauling five-gallon buckets of water for the beet and rutabaga transplants when the pooch came to visit again. “What'cha doing?” he asked.
“Oh, just moving water from one place to another, in the strange way humans have,” I said with a sigh. The sigh was because the irrigation wasn't working in that section, and it would require a day or more of hard hand-digging and pipe-fixing to repair it. So my hour-long watering with a yogurt tub dipped in the buckets of water was less efficient in the long run, but a lot faster in the short run, especially since my little transplants were looking pretty sad.
“Oh,” said the pooch, taking a drink from my bucket of water and then going to take a nap in the shade.
A third day I was pulling out old cabbage and broccoli stalks from the early planting when the pooch visited. “What'cha doing now?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “I'm pulling out these plants and moving them to another place, in the strange way humans have.”
“Oh,” he said, as he took a cabbage stalk to the shade to chew on before taking a nap.
Then came a day when the pooch was lying in the shade and my home-for-the-weekend daughter came to visit me. I could see her coming down the edge of the garden. I started laughing to myself, waiting for her to say 'What'cha doing?'
Instead she said, “What are you laughing about?”
“I'm waiting for you to ask me what I'm doing, and then I'm going to say I'm watering in the carrot seed.”
“But you're weeding the scallions,” she said.
I laughed some more. “Right, this is a little side job, a fast little side job, but really I'm watering in the carrots.”
“And what about this hoe?” she asked.
“That's another little side job. I'm weeding the carrots, too, but really I'm just watering them in.”
“This sounds exactly like my whole childhood,” said my daughter. “One job turns into ten little side jobs that will only take a minute. But really they take hours.”
“Yeah!” I agreed happily. “Look how much I'm getting done while I'm watering in the carrots!”
“But isn't the dog lying on them?” she asked. There was a nice shady spot on the far edge of the yet-to-sprout carrot bed.
“Maybe's he's pressing in the seed? So they have nice firm contact with the soil.”
“Huh,” said my daughter. “You were really mad at him the other day when he ran through this very bed.”
“I know, I know, because his feet made huge gouges. But now he's distributing his weight evenly over the seeds. Don't you think?”
“You're kind of strange,” said my daughter, in the friendliest of ways..
“That's what the pooch thinks too,” I answered. “Hey, you want to help me move some rocks or some water or some plants from one place to another?”
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Sept 16 - Sept 22, 2026