Putting the A in Agricultural

I’m on the exhausted end of a very satisfying weekend. Somewhere over the last seven years Trent and I have evolved from two people sitting in an apartment wondering what we would do when we bought a house and had to deal with yard work to being two people, well, four people, who wished they hadn’t left the packet of black-eyed susan seeds and onion bulbs in the cart at Home Depot on Friday night. Between Friday night and Sunday evening we bought plants, transplanted plants, ripped out grass and added another flower bed, added two loads of dirt to our beds, and moved our compost pile. I split my time between being outside when Tate was napping and being inside with him, but Trent worked pretty much nonstop all weekend. He moved wheelbarrow after wheel barrow full of dirt and his little helper stayed pretty close to his side.

Rush came up to me yesterday and said “gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish dirt! dirt!”

I love the process of working in the yard and I’m especially into compost. I love that a pile of food scraps, grass, and leaves can turn into soil that we can use. It’s the same feeling I get when I make chicken stock and I feel like I would have made a fabulous pioneer woman. (Although technically I would make a horrible pioneer woman…recently we lost electricity for 45 minutes and besides the fact that I couldn’t complete the simplest task, all I could think was “Thank you God that I dried my hair before the power went out.”) Anyway, we moved a lot of very organic (organic in the real sense, not the trendy sense) black soil into our garden, where we planted tomatoes, basil, thyme, and parsley and would have planted onions had we not misplaced them. There was, however, one problem with the compost:

It’s that damn Sun Chips bag! We found it deep in the midst of the good soil in the bottom of the compost. It’s been in that pile for a year. Hey Frito Lay, your compostable bag didn’t work.

That didn’t ruin our weekend or anything though. The weather was beautiful and there was work to be done. In addition to the herbs and tomatoes we planted flowers –zinnias I think, but who can remember? I’m just trying to finish writing this so I can go to bed- and a few azalea bushes. Truly most of the weekend was spend ripping up grass and hauling dirt. And I did get one of my wishes for the back patio: hanging ferns!

Tate’s take on all this: Farmers Fight!

We didn’t get any “after” pictures of all our hard work and now it’s dark. Trent’s asleep on the couch and my brain is starting to shut down with tiredness…

I do want to give a big, hearty thank you to Trent for putting in some serious man hours and power this weekend. The yard is looking great and he made it possible. On my own I would have stopped somewhere around the time when I tried to move the wheelbarrow that was full of clay. Trent, thank you. Love, your wife.