We Admired Our Work for the Rest of the Evening

Saturday afternoon we put in the garden. It took from 10 in the morning until nearly 4:30 that afternoon.

We started with last year’s auxiliary vegetable patch,

which this year we expanded so it will be the primary vegetable garden. We'll plant last year's long skinny one in spaghetti squash, zucchini, and pumpkins.

Jeffrey rented a tiller. Working up last year’s spot went well. Breaking up the new ground was a lot more work. Our yard slopes so half the time he was pushing the tiller uphill.

It took about three hours worth of work to get the garden spot ready. That included raking grass out of the way, filling two five-gallon buckets of dirt and grass and hauling to the compost box that contains mostly onion peels and strawberry tops. (Did I tell you I got a countertop composter for Christmas?) The three hours included included dumping bags of humus and manure onto the garden and using the tiller to work it into the soil. (Next year we'll get to use our very own compost.)

I drove the tiller for a few minutes;

less than five minutes and I could feel it in my arms. I don’t know how Jeffrey did it for a solid two hours or better.

Then came the fun part: planting.

We planted pimiento peppers, bell peppers, brandywine tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cucumber, squash, eggplant, butter beauty lettuce, and green beans.




We ran out of steam before we got the herbs in the planter boxes or planted the sweet pea and dahlia seeds. Or built the trellis for the cucumbers; Jeffrey did all that Monday night before dinner.


It may not look like all that much in the photo but that there is a good day's work.