This weekend, as evidenced by the picture above, we put in a new flower bed. Not just any flower bed mind you, we tried the “Small steps to Greatness” Tony-Robbins approach last year and while interesting, found it ultimately unsatisfying in level of difficulty. So, we went all out this past weekend and the weekend before. Two weekends ago, I drew the backyard to scale and we mapped out (not only bumpkins, we’re also geeks. . .or nerds. . .whatever) what we wanted to do with it, starting with that flower bed.
So that weekend, we outlined the bed and began the tortuous task of removing all the soil-like clay substance and magically transporting it to another universe (You tossed it over the fence – Ed. I have to tell myself certain things to sleep at night, thanks). That was hard in the eating the Big Country Breakfast from IHOP kinda way. Not in the 52 hard-boiled eggs in an hour Paul Newman sort of way. We saved that for this weekend.
This weekend, we commenced Operation Holy Crap That’s A Big Flower Bed to Fill. We had already bought 1200 pounds of dirt-like substances (top soil, cow manure, and organic humus to dip the cow manure in with Kalamata olives) and I proceeded to mix that up and pour it in the huge hole in our back yard, naively assuming half a ton of dirt would be plenty.
Ha.
3300 pounds and 4 trips to Home Depot later, we had a full bed. Of course we were much too tired to plant anything which is half most all of the fun in putting in a flower bed. So what I thought would be a one weekend task has turned into the Gardening Opus (and trust me, if after moving 4500 pounds of dirt from Home Depot-to the cart-into an Eclipse-out of an Eclipse-into a wheelbarrow-into the backyard-back into the wheelbarrow for mixing and into the bed, Berkeley Breathed’s fat little bird had waltzed across the backyard, I would have only giggled and offered him an anchovy).
This week we plant. We’re making half of it an herb garden and the other an annual bed. Check back for futher updates.
In other news, we saw Rocky Horror Picture Show done with puppets. See Katy for that write up.