COVID 19 Quarantine Day 32 - Saturday - The Garden Part 1

We've had so much happening the last few days I just haven't had the energy to get it all up on the blog, but now I have the time and energy and a few days of backlogged information that needs added here.  Maybe this week I'll stay on top of things and actually blog daily what's been happening.  But, knowing my track record, I'll probably get everything caught up, except for an entry about today, then by this evening I'll be over it and just like that, Ill be behind again.  🙈  We'll see...

So here's what happened Saturday...

We got my garden put together!!!  Oh my goodness, it is sooooooo beautiful!!!  Michael and Daddy worked so hard putting it all together!  I owe them so much!  I am so spoiled!!  Daddy picked up the skid steer in Andover around 8 and brought it over.  Then he and Michael got the boxes in place and screwed together (the 3 new boxes are all attached to one another).  They moved the landscape timbers out of the way so we didn't run over them with the skid steer.  Around 9:30 the dirt guy brought the dirt and dumped it on the driveway.  The kids were EXTREMELY excited about this and proceeded to play in the dirt for, literally, hours!  Daddy got buckets full of dirt on the skid steer and dumped it into the garden boxes.  Michael moved the dirt around when it came time to top the boxes off.  We completely buried the strawberries, so hopefully they'll go ahead and keep coming up out of the dirt.  We didn't cover the carrots because, the way I figure it, they're such small little seedlings as it is, they really need to not be squished in a foot of dirt.  I just don't think they'd survive.  So I'm going to slowly add more soil to the top of them and hopefully they'll keep growing into some delicious carrots.  After all the dirt was in the boxes Daddy brought the remaining dirt to the back yard and made a pile.  The kids played in the front pile until it was too small and then they moved and played in the back pile.  They were completely filthy when it was all said and done!  Michael and Daddy laid the fence out where it was going to go.  That's when I realized I had made a math error as I was planning the garden.  I had been measure the boxes as 3ft x 9ft, but that is the inside measurement.  They are actually 3 feet 3 inches wide each.  When you multiply that by 4 boxes, I lost a foot of walking space on the south side of the last bed!  I had it planned at 2 feet 6 inches, so now I was down to about 1 foot 6 inches!  That would have been enough room to move, but now really enough to work well on that south end, so Mama, the kids, and I loaded up in my car and headed out to grab lunch and a decorative end piece that would extend the front fence from 32 feet to 33 feet 4 inches (giving me 2 feet 10 inches of work space on the south end, MUCH better!).  We had Ziggy's Pizza for lunch!  It was so good!  Picasso's is still my favorite pizza in town, but I think Ziggy's is my second favorite!  I like having a couple pizza places that I like, and I like even more that they're local small businesses.  Michael loves pizza and so do the kids.  I'm not sure about them, but Michael would eat pizza 3 meals a day if I'd let him, I'm pretty sure.  So to be able to have a couple good pizza places that we can go to and to be able to support a local small business is just really great!  :)  Once we got back with the fence piece (and the hardware for the arbor gate, which apparently we hadn't gotten when we bought the gate a couple months ago), everything we up pretty quick.  Mama and I laid down the weed matting on the north end of the garden, where I'd failed to lay it last year, plus along the entire front end of the entire garden.  Then Daddy and Michael put the fence in place, staked it end, ziptied the arbor to the fence, staked the arbor in, and we were done for the day!  It's so beautiful!!  I love it so much!  I'm so glad we went with the arbor instead of the decorative gate.  Thanks, Mama and Daddy for me birthday present!!  It might be my favorite part of the garden right now!!  I can't wait to put hanging baskets of flowers on it and get clematis growing up it!  :-D  I'm so excited!  I really wish it wasn't cold this week, because I desperately want to get plants or even seeds in the ground!  Soon enough!  Get excited, because I am going to be writing lots of posts about my garden soon!!  :-D  YYYYYYYYAAAAAAYYYYY!!!!!!!!

Playing in the dirt

Friday night, before we REALLY got started.  Last year all I had was what that make-shift fence is around.  Things are about to get much bigger!

They're having so much fun!

The dirt is so soft they just sunk into it!

This doesn't even remotely begin to show how dirty they got...  Blech!  But they had fun playing outside and that's a wonderful thing!

Ok, so, here's the deal...  I have a lot more pictures I want to upload.  But I need to do some moving around, because there are pictures Michael took and I need them on my account...  So I guess this is a good stopping point for a while.  I'll work on those pictures and planning my garden and be back on here a little more later.  Sorry you'll have to wait for the pictures of the final product, but it'll only end up being a few hours.  ;-)

Love you all!  Be back later!!