Takin' Care of Business

Aaron is pumping up the wheel on the wheelbarrow, but it looks like he's about to detonate a bomb.

Between the weather and our children, we haven't been able to get as much work done on the garden as we would have liked. Until yesterday. Ryan and Melissa offered to come over had give us a few extra hands. The soil was our first priority because it had a lot of rocks in it and is made up completely of clay. We did a lot of sifting using a sieve that Ryan had made. Then we filled up the back of Ryan and Melissa's new Jeep with compost (don't worry, we used a tarp), and spent a lot of the afternoon mixing compost into our clay to make it happy dirt.

Here's what it looked like post-compost. :) Also, ignore our grass, the owners are in the process of getting us an edger, but until they do, our yard will look a little redneck around the edges. We are also in the process of making trellises to go around the right side (by the fence) and across the back of the middle two boxes for all of our hanging/vine plants (tomatoes, squash, and peas). The farthest back right box is where we are going to plant our watermelon. The furthest back left box, we are leaving for compost. The middle right box is going to have tomatoes and squash on the outside edge by the trellis and a zucchini in the middle. The middle left box is going to have peas and cucumbers along the back by the trellis, lots of beans, onions, carrots, and some marigolds. The big box will have our four surviving giant sunflowers (that are still in my kitchen window), a few rows of corn, peppers (green and a chocolate kind that Ryan and Melissa gave us!), and tomatoes. We might try our hand at some lettuce somewhere too, but haven't decided yet. I'm pretty excited about the whole thing.

Here's our gardening crew: Adelia, Aaron, Me, Ivan, Lincoln, Ryan, and Melissa. The kids actually did pretty good. Ivan and Adelia napped most of the time. And we gave Lincoln the special job of pulling the live worms out of the sieve and putting them back in the garden before they got grated into bits.

At the very end, when everyone was up, they played a super fun game, where Uncle Ryan would throw the soccer ball tied onto a rope up as high as he could in the air, and the boys would run to retrieve it after it landed. They thought that was the greatest.

Adelia tasted her first dirt ever, and her millionth grass ever, and sucked on Ryan's glasses for dessert. Doesn't she look like she's trying to be sneaky? She did a very good job of slobberifying them.

After Ryan and Melissa left, and we ate dinner and put the kids to bed, Aaron got one of our trellises put up, and I got the big garden box all measured of with string to make 1x1 foot squares. Hopefully the weather will cooperate and we can finish the trellises and plant our plants early next week.