Mixing The Dirt

I'm back to continue the story of my garden. In the last post, we filled the giant hole in the ground with water and let it soak in. It really was a lot easier to do it this way. We still needed to use the our "Mexican jack hammer," as my dad likes to call it. The picture below is my friend Sara displaying the Mexican jack hammer we used. Look at those muscles! That thing was far from light. We also used a pickaxe to loosen up the dirt.

Since I'm showing a picture of Sara, I have to tell the little story about her daughter. When we filled the hole up with water and came back the next day to check on it, Laney, Sara's daughter, was with us. I decided to make a joke, "Too bad you don't have your swimsuit Laney, we could go swimming." That was a bad idea! Next thing I know, she comes back out and is stripped down to her underwear with her floaties on. She runs out and says, "I'm ready!" Of course we had to say no to her swimming in her underwear in muddy water. Needless to say she was pretty mad. I know, I'm horrible but I had to take a couple picture of how upset she was. She yelled at me to stop laughing in that last picture.

The next day the dirt had soaked up all of the water and it was muddy. Laney was with me when I went outside to check. She had the greatest idea. To play in the mud. Yes, I got conned by a 3 year old but it was fun. We took our shoes and socks off and walked around in the mud.

 She looks a lot cuter here when shes happy and muddy.

After we dug up a few more inches we started talking about just making a box garden. It was starting to become very difficult to shovel deeper. I can't remember exactly now, how many feet and inches went went down but it was over a foot. Sara, Delaney, and myself took a field trip to one of our local Home Depot's to buy wood, brackets, and screws. It took awhile to figure everything out since we had never really built anything like this. And of course we didn't look anything up before we left. But we ended up getting enough wood for what we wanted to do.

This was all done at the beginning of December, 2012. I wanted to get a lot done before I had to leave for three weeks for Michigan. When I finally got back from my trip, I found that my friends had already started on cutting the wood and putting it together. I got home on January 3rd, and we started working on putting the boards together and evening out the sides of the hole.

The picture to the left was taken the next day. We finally had all the wood put together. We were now ready to fill up the giant hole. We only bought three bags of vegetable garden soil, three bags of compost, and a bag of worm casings. This obviously wasn't enough to fill in the hole we had. I remembered that there was a farm down the street from the house that was selling compost. I called them up and they said they would fill up the back of a pickup truck for $30. That's what we did. On the way back to the house I had to drive really slow because I could feel fenders of the truck hitting the tires. The bed of the truck was SUPER full. When we got back to the house we realized that we were going to have to figure out another way to take the compost from the truck and into the garden. The wheelbarrow we were going to use had a flat, sun rotted wheel. We used five gallon buckets to transport the compost from the truck to the garden. We had to call in extra help to get all of the compost out of the bed of the truck. We took the compost, five bags of the vegetable gardening soil, and the dirt we dug out to make the hole and mixed it all together. In the picture below on the right shows the filter we used to sift out all of the roots and rock out of the dirt. We mixed all of the dirt up with hoes. It reminded me of mixing brownie batter. Watching all of the different colors of dirt come together to become what we wanted. We wanted a nice dark color rather than the light color of the dirt we started out with.

The truck full of compost.

The pile of dirt we used to mix in with the compost.

 We finished the next morning. We added the last of the compost and mixed it in. A friend brought over his rototiller to help mix everything up more. That thing made a big difference. We leveled off the dirt and added the 3 bags of organic compost to the top. The worm casings, we sprinkled on top of the compost and then gave the garden a good watering. An hour or so later we planted two different tomato plants and a jalapeno plant.