Thought we would never finish.

A whole lot of progress happened Saturday in the garden:



These boots are made for gardening



We finished filling in the hole!!! 12 yards of fresh new dirt.

Cedar Grove Veggie Mix & Booster Blend is amazing stuff.

If you live locally and need good soil this is the place to go.



I also found a new favorite view from upstairs!



10 yards on the new side filled in the hole and we amended the original garden side with another 2 yards to improve drainage and raise the level. With a punch card we got 1 yard free with purchase of 5 yards. Cedar Grove also has a happy hour(!) during late afternoon on Saturdays where you save 15%.

 

We had help from some (awesome) friends Saturday, so the last 4 yards went much quicker.
I mentioned how much faster it went with 2 people shovelling in the wheel barrow,

 as I was on the rake duty spreading it out and could barely keep up--

and the wise ass in the picture below(right) chimed in with 

"What like 2x faster?"

 I promised to put this pic on the Internet for it.

I was down to primitive brain with all the labor

What a dirty job we had! I am so grateful for the help to get it finished.

I wanted to rake it all out nice and pretty but I was out of energy

Here we were a month ago... a big muddy hole that I could hardly imagine the finished project.

Now we can get on to the planting!!  I have peas, lettuce and spinach waiting. Along with kale, collards and chard coming on Wednesday!! Luckily I have a seed starting fiend of a friend that will be supplying all these babies. I'm not ready to be starting seeds with my current set up. Now I just have to plan the layout and pick out a few new things. We are on for broccoli, carrots, potatos, zucchini, cucumber, yellow squash, tomatoes, & peppers. Also outside the fence we have asparagus and pumpkins. I just may run out of room!
Any suggestions? Requests? Horror stories?



In other news

 This is what we have been up to the last week...
I took this.....

 And made this!

It was actually the easiest part ofcleaning/sanding/priming all the cupboards.

With a little help from a friend, we got this accomplished on a Saturday night!

I am great company eh?

I know it is just primer, but it is my 2nd can!

And I am done with this phase and have just bought the actual paint!!!

(please kindly forget that I started this project in November)

A tree left our skyline.

I preferred the threesome but after a walk thru the neighborhood we determined it was 2 different property owners, so we are unlikely to lose the other 2. The trunk is now completely gone.

The lovely Crocus' graced our presence all day this Saturday,

opening wider and wider, making our dirty chores somehow funner....

I had to make this pic bigger because all the other pictures hurt to look at.

Our mud puddles of the week dried up!
While we went from this....



 to this...

.

Once the sun starts going down the pictures are really hard to get decent pictures.

We measured it and it is exactly 1ft deep. We amaze me sometimes.

 
I hope you can all see the progress that left us groaning and limping today! We are some tired units ready for bed at 9pm on a Saturday night.  Grueling work! I did time our slowest load. 15 minutes to fill a wheel barrow! Travis cuts the dirt from the earth, and loads up my sifter with 5ish shovels of dirt(clay!!)I sift rocks and clear rocks to bucket and REPEAT. For 4 HOURS!
We have 1 more section of fence to do this to before we get to the pretilled garden of last year which will be a relief.

The point of all this is to bring in good dirt for veggie growing. Meanwhile using the bad soil instead of creating a huge pile of it. I tried giving up this project over and over and Travis won't let me. I have suggested NOT having such a huge garden, building raised beds, selling the house and having children and waiting 10 years for them to do it.
I'm pretty sure there are easier ways to do this--but this is the cheapest most efficient method.


This is what we created :


I always miss the before pictures so you get a during picture..






We were about a foot short all the way around this South Garden along with every other part of the retaining wall we inherited....


This is the South Garden after.


It is a bit dirty after all that work, but I could not push a broom any longer. Just too much like the raking action I had been doing all day.  I get to plant every plant I ever dreamed of in this lovely full sun garden! Lilacs, roses, peonies, Oh my!





We also finished off Travis' garden, the grass strip. It is all so much nicer to the eye, even just dirt!  Travis says mowing will be so much easier... I am not sure if it is because it is NOW less grass, or the eventual grass will be even....

My first daffodil snuck in to this pic at the top right

And with all that work and creating we have a whole lotta rocks.

Rocks mixed with CLAY!

I have lost count of how many buckets worth now.

But on Saturday we were averaging 1 bucket full of rocks per wheel barrow full of dirt.

That is 1 bucket of rocks per 15 minutes and I only have 3 buckets!

Now we must wash off the rocks for some future use,

which I have no doubt we will find with the rainfall and drainage of the clay

The best part of the rocks!! This one we picked up at the cement dump of Pacific Topsoils. Paid to get rid of cement, and brought home a huge rock as a trophy!

This one is a close 2nd in size--and we found it in our yard.

I am not sure what I want with these gigantic rocks, but want them I do.

In other news, I caught Fred sleeping this week! He is an early riser and is usually up before me. In 8 years I have never seen him sleeping! By the time I found the camera he was waking up.

Dirt, rocks, dirt, rocks... soon we will be back to having garden and moving upstairs!!!