spuddle
To loosen and dig up stubble and weeds left after a harvest with a broadshare or similar device.
Do you shim those stubbles before ploughing? Answer. No; but I spuddle them, to make the ground as clean as possible. Spuddling is performed with the plough, and is of the nature of shiming.
To shallowly dig or stir up in an unsystematic manner.
Instead of an "occasional gardener" to trim up the walks, and to hoe, your wife will be as happy as a queen, and your daughters as princesses, to spuddle about now and then, and have little flower gardens, and herb beds.
To make a lot of fuss about trivial things, as if they were important
obsolete
During all the years that I spuddled around in a porcelain bath tub in a city I was given to regarding the farmer somewhat as the caricaturist, who wears his spring overcoat all winter and sells jokes for 10 cents each to the newspapers, painted him.
To work ineffectively; to work hard but achieve nothing
obsolete
In what glooın are you all left to spuddle out your way through the road of life?
Where it comes from
Possibly from the Middle English term for a short knife, by extension, leading to the shallow plow, and from there to other more metaphoric meanings. Related to spud.
Adapted from the Wiktionary entry spuddle (CC BY-SA 4.0).