Spring Garden Work

Let me start this off by saying I am not a big fan of yard work. However, I do love having an attractive yard, and my wife absolutely loves to garden and does an amazing job of making our yard beautiful. She has immersed herself in gardening books, magazines, and garden web sites since we bought our house. This winter was particular hard on our garden as we had a lot of hard freezes, many coming in consecutive nights. It was a very cold winter here in N. Fl. (where are you Al Gore).

That being said my wife had plans of expanding her garden beds and having a larger "canvas" to work with this spring. While I don't like working in the yard I do love making my wife happy, and I promised to help get the spring started right. Here is the rest of the story with pictures and commentary.

Day 1 was mostly all E working on laying out her expansions and digging up grass.I joined in on Saturday.





My job on Day 1 was to drive out west of town to a dirt and sand supplier and pick up a yard of soil. Here in N. Fl our ground is mostly clay, which becomes very packed and hard, and makes it very difficult to dig and plant in. So the process of expanding beds takes a lot more work and muscle. Our plan was to amend the soil to make things easier in the future.






All of that dirt/grass piled up had to be hauled off. The beds then had to be turned over (read dug deeper and churned up). The beds had to be filled with the black dirt and that mixed in with the clay. We worked on this most of the day on Saturday. Then we called in reinforcements.





This made the mixing and amending easier and allowed the goal of breaking up of all the clay to be attainable, but it was no easy feat even with the tiller. Here is the final of the beds after being amended and ready for planting. Updates to come once some of the plants go in. As I type my wife is doing the "fun" part and working on that very thing.