Double Digging

	Here is my embarrassing and painful double-digging experience. The books all say to mark out my beds with string. I thought that was a waste, so I just marked the corners of my bed with sticks. I quickly learned that I am incapable of digging a straight line without the aid of string (see photo) so I put in a string. Here you see my first trench. I am removing the sod and digging about a foot down and setting the topsoil aside.
	A closer view of how things progress as I extend my trench to the full 20 foot length of the bed. I use my spade to cut a trench about two spades wide. I found that making my trench one spade wide didn't give me any "wiggle room".
	When I've cut an outline of the new bit to be dug, I simply dig down about a foot (one spade depth) and set that soil aside.
	Once the first foot or so of soil was removed, I used a garden fork to loosen the soil another foot deep. I put the fork in the bottom of the trench the entire depth of the tines, and lifted the dirt out and kind of bounced the dirt on the tines to break up the clods. I removed a few rocks this way, too.
	Here I've completed the first trench in the bed and I'm making a second pass. I began the second pass by digging up the sod and flipping it, upside down, into the first trench. Now I'm digging that top foot of dirt out of the second trench and moving it into my first trench.
	One thing I've learned is that I should dig my trenches the width of my bed, rather than the length of the bed as you see me doing here. Digging the length results in way too much dirt to "set aside" and I have the sinking feeling that when I dig that last length of bed I'm going to end up hauling all that heavy dirt back and filling in the last trench. Ugh. If I'd done this width-wise instead of length-wise, I'd only have a small bit of dirt set aside.
	This is a close-up of the second pass. You can see my spade in the second trench on the right of the photo. My piled up dirt is on the left. If you look at the full sized version of the photo you'll see I'm way "out of bounds" and my dirt pile covers my boundary string. I found if I try to put the dirt from the second trench neatly into the first trench, it all just falls into the second trench. You can also see where I've put some peat moss and composted manure in the first trench, where I haven't yet dug the second trench and covered up the first. The first trench doesn't look too deep here, and it's not. Fluffing up that bottom layer of dirt with the garden fork, then turning the sod over from the second trench into the first, really filled things up.
	My soil is a good mixture of clayey sand. It needs a lot of organic material, but it's a good base. It has a lot of rocks in it; I think the whole valley we live in used to be a river bed at one time. I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with all these rocks. They're small enough that tomato roots will just grow around them, but if I try to grow carrots in this, they'll look pretty funky.
	Here are the rocks I picked up after just 45 minutes of digging with the shovel. I need to figure out some way to screen the rocks out of the dirt as I go. 2x4 and 2x2 woven wire seems way too big, chicken wire seems too flimsy, and rabbit hutch wire (hardware cloth?) seems too small. I'm still pondering this.