A good kind of tired....

A good kind of tired....

May 3rd & 4th -- I spent this weekend in the yard...not lounging but slaving away.  The goal was to set the wooden raise bed frames into the ground by digging so that the corner stakes of the frames would be underground 3-4" permitting the beds to rest on the ground so that I wouldn't lose soil.   Well, that was the plan.  It turned out that just like my old house, nothing was square.  The ground was uneven, even after it was "leveled" and filled with pea gravel and the raised bed frames are not square because several of the boards were warped.  Nevertheless, after all that digging to set the frames, I also ended up relocating the composter before I actually got around to hauling the "planter's mix" to the beds.  Needless to say, I slept extremely well Saturday night after being in the yard from about 10:00 am to 7:00 pm and I am anticipating another good night of sleep after being in the yard today from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm.

The main task today was moving the mountain of "planter's mix" to the raised beds.

After about 3 hours, I realized that I needed to take some photos...so here is the delivered soil after 3 hours of work.  I would shovel the soil into a 5 gallon bucket, attach the bucket to a handy "magna cart" so that I could wheel the cart from the back of the garage and then pull it up the stairs through the gate in the rear fence to whichever raised bed I wanted to fill -- all five of them.

Here is Mt Planter's Mix after about three hours of labor.....

And here it what it looked like when I decided to quit at the end of the day.  I lost count of the number of trips I made with my 5 gallon bucket.  Let me just say that both my back and arms concur that it was a ginormous number of trips.

Here is one of the raised beds, filled with planter's mix and mulch, but I decided to remove the mulch because I want to use all of the planter's mix.  You can also see the irrigation hose, because the landscaper will be back tomorrow afternoon to install the nozzles.  I need to figure out how I am going to rototill these beds with the irrigation hose!

I ended up relocating the composter and using the compost in some of the raised beds and pulling out the old turf that the landscaper removed to compost.  Now I have my black composter and a steel garbage can with no bottom as my two composters along the north side of the house, as shown below.

Here is where the composter used to be...near the south fence by the edge of the garage and along the little wooden deck I built several years ago.

By the end of the day on Sunday, you can see here that I not only filled the five raised beds, but I had to move a pile of mulch from one of the 8 by 8 beds to the corner of the backyard.  I'll put the mulch in the beds, but after the irrigation is complete tomorrow.

I also moved a couple of wheelbarrow loads of the planter's mix to a little planting bed in between the front privacy fence and the patio of the south side deck.  I need to split a bunch of daylilies and will transplant them into this flower bed.

I noticed that along the south side of the patio, in an existing flower bed, the hostas are coming up.

 Some lily of the valley are also coming up

And the periwinkle ground cover has flowered

 Here is the view from the porch off the master bedroom as I look out over the fruits of my labor while I am sipping a cold beer, after a physically taxing weekend.  Yeah, but it is a good kind of tired! 


 I know I will sleep well tonight.