We spent a glorious day at the farm working on the future garden spot. This is actually the first step toward building the house for reasons that will become clear soon (hopefully). It was a great day and we were serenaded by several hundred Canadian geese that were grazing and flying in the field next to us. We also got to slog through some lovely mud, but the day was nice enough to ignore that.
see all the dark specs - they're geese!
We started by measuring and staking the corners of the future hoop house so that we had a reference point for both the garden beds and the garden fence (both of which have to allow enough room to erect the hoop house at some point in the future).
Me on one end of a 100' tape measure, Jeremy and Jacob on the other
Once we had that, we decided where the corners of the fence would be and Jeremy started digging the holes for the massive 10' poles that will hold the corners. He also moved the large poles into each location. Now, this presented one particular problem - some of these are large enough to be very difficult even for Jeremy to move. What we needed was a truck. What we had was a hatchback car. Which leads to one and only solution...
Looking at the bottom of the last hole...is it deep enough?
Yep - that's deep enough (those would be the post hole diggers halfway in the hole).
Meanwhile, the kids and I measured and staked the locations for all the garden beds. Jacob did an excellent job of pounding in almost all the corner stakes while I measured them out and started building beds.
After a short break, the kids shoveled topsoil into the wheel barrow so that I could spread it on the future beds. We put some straw from our stash down first to add organic matter. This ground has been run over with a large excavator to compact the soil (part of making a level pad) and its all clay subsoil from the hill behind the existing hoop house. While that isn't exactly a recipe for a beautiful garden spot, it is no worse than what we started with in town. We have been here before! On the plus side, the topsoil is beautiful and not compacted and we have ample soil ammendments to help improve the clay. The site is also right next to our water spigot and gets full sun all day which should help overall.
Kids tearing into the mountain of topsoil
We had enough time to dig all 4 corner posts for the fence and to put down straw and the first layer of soil on 2 and a half garden beds. We'll keep working our way through it this week and see where we end up for Saturday!
Here are the first 2 beds with the rest staked out. We finished putting the dirt on top of the straw before we left.
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