Digging up a boxwood shrub in the front garden
I thrust the spade into the dirt and stomped on the step to drive it deeper. Under the top layer of soil, there was gravel. I kept stabbing with the spade, thinking that I could cut past the loose rock. But with each thrust, the point of the spade was only sinking a few inches into the soil, before hitting a rock and bouncing back. Still, I kept stabbing. Until I saw orange sparks, buzzing away like bugs, from the metal striking the stone.
So I threw the spade out on the lawn and got down on my hands and knees and started digging with the hand trowel. With the smaller tool, I was able to scrape away the top layer of dirt and then dig out each individual rock one by one.
Once I had a trench around the shrub, I tossed the hand trowel aside, stood up, retrieved the spade, and went back to thrusting and stomping. With the rock removed, the spade was cutting through the dirt like a knife through butter.
I thrust the spade in at an angle to get underneath the shrub then, using the outside edge of the trench as leverage, leaned down with all my weight on the handle. With each lean, the shrub rose another inch out of the ground. I could hear the muffled sound of roots snapping in the soil underneath.
When it felt like all the roots had lost their grip in the earth, I snaked my hand through the branches and the leaves, grabbed the trunk, and pulled up. A few roots were still attached, but they were weak, thin roots, which broke as I yanked the shrub, severed roots dangling beneath, free from the earth.