Yahoo! The sun was shining Saturday so it was time to work on the garden.

Here’s how it looked at the end of the day. (Of course, Beautiful still put in another two hours afterwards on her flower beds up by the house.) On the left is the shoop, still half-painted, with the duck door and duck yard at extreme left. In the center is the entrance to the garden, and the garden itself at the right. (It has a 7-foot mesh fence all around it to keep the locals out.) Those are our five raised beds with their fresh layer of manure. The three beds that are planted have mesh fabric over them, attached with clothespins to steel wire hoops. They look like long, low covered wagons. The fabric is supposed to keep them warmer and protect them from wind, helping the plants do better than they did last year.

Then daughter 2 helped me plant the following:
3 rows of carrots
2 rows radishes
1/2 row parsley
1/2 row spinach (transplants; they were reseeds from last year)
1/2 row scallions
1 row peas
1 row snow peas
1 row lettuce

That filled up the three beds you see here. Beautiful transplanted all her strawberries up to the new strawberry bed alonside the driveway. One of the remaining beds will be completely tomatoes, and the other qué sé yo.

Squash & pumpkins go at the front and the back of the raised beds. Hence the rental of Rototiller-zilla. (See below.)

First we put on some 1200 lbs. of 2-year-old manure. Looks and smells like topsoil. We filled the raised bed to the top with this stuff, and planted everything in it. Daughter 1 is raking the piles smooth, Dad is hauling the wheelbarrow, Daughter 3 what is she doing? Dogs are inspecting, Daughter 2 is taking picture. Rototiller-zilla in foreground.

Here are the beds all filled up. Look closely, darling, and you can see the steel hoops awaiting their fabric (first, though, I have to plant). The foremost bed has last year’s garlic coming up great guns.

Rototiller-zilla: $40 for four hours of misery. This beast was better than six feet long, weighed north of 150 lbs. I’m guessing, and has a turning radius of half a mile. You see how tight our space is. Plus it’s full of rocks and sticks; this whole garden/duck area was the staging area when our property was first logged (because it’s relatively level) and so is full of sticks. The idea was to rip up some of the rocky soil and plant squash outside of the planting boxes. Instead, Doug’s entire upper body was ripped up.

Thank heavens Sunday was the day of rest. Literally.