Dig It

A couple of weeks ago, Mike and I started the excavation of the garden. The plan: take out all grass, brush and stumps, and get the areas marked for where we will place the coop, garden beds, compost bins and rain barrel. Here's the sketch I made of our plans:

The area marked grasses, vining plants and flowers was looking pretty rough:

Dead stuff, some trees that had grown on their own, weeds, prickly bushes... all things that had to go. We started by digging this stuff up and tearing out the old garden fabric that weeds were growing through. While I worked on this, Mike took out the old garden bed and the boards separating the garden and the hill. Leela had fun helping.

Boards removed, all that remained on the garden level was our compost bins. Although less than a year old, these compost bins that we bought on the cheap from Lowes have not held up well. One of the lids snapped off and the sides were barely together anymore. We made the decision to dismantle them and build new ones. They were ugly anyway. Right?

There were a lot of stumps and roots on the hill that had to be removed. It was time consuming and exhausting.

Leela was definitely exhausted.

Almost finished. At this point I stopped taking photos, so just imagine all of the grassy stuff removed, okay?

Once finished with this, Mike and I used string tied to plastic stakes to mark the boundaries of the fence we are preparing to build. Being the crazy perfectionist engineer that he is, Mike went back out a second time and re-marked all of the stakes. Pretend with me that this is a real picture and not just something I doodled for fun. This is basically what it looks like:

Next up, digging holes for the posts and putting up a fence!