Gardens And Compost And Digging, Oh My!

I have potatoes cooking in our solar oven out back, and clothes drying on a drying rack on the back porch.  I love using passive, free energy.  I have been neglecting my blog a bit lately, but it’s because the chores list these days is a bit overwhelming.  Last night my arms felt like lumps of lead by the time we went to bed.  I spent half the day in the yard, pulling/shoveling weeds out of the gravel driveway that leads to the large gate in our side fence.  It was so full of weeds that you could barely see the pea gravel under all of them.  Now it’s a nice stretch of gravel leading to the gate, and looks much better.  We are definitely popular with the neighbors, as the lot is no longer an eyesore.  And we have no need for a gym membership lately, since we spend all of our free time doing manual labor!

We’re double-digging the soil in our garden beds, which is also a very labor-intensive task.  I finished one bed a couple days ago, and got a bunch of cucumber and watermelon plants into that one.  I’m working on the second bed right now – I’ve finished the first dig, but will be going down another 12 inches this evening.  Once I finish, I’ll transplant our lettuce and swiss chard plants into that bed, hopefully this evening.

We purchased a trailer-load of compost last week, and have been adding that to our garden beds.  It was only $20 for the whole load (found a dairy farmer on Craigs List who makes compost from his manure and sells it for much less than commercial compost places).  That was a great deal, but it was quite the process to get it home.  A tire on our trailer shredded, probably because the load of compost was so heavy, and it was causing the bolts on the wheel covers to rub against the tires.  Long story short, it was evening, and we couldn’t get replacement tires until the next day.  So the trailer of compost spent the night on the side of the interstate.  The next day, my husband went and changed the tires (not fun on the side of the interstate) and then drove the rest of the way home on the shoulder of the road at 25 miles an hour.  I think if we ever need compost again, we’ll have it delivered.  That stuff is heavy!  But we shouldn’t need to buy compost again, as we’re back to making our own now.

Hope you’re all having a great weekend!