A Narrated Visual Journey of this Weekend in the Garden

We started Saturday morning, Pup wanted to help. We packed up all of the plants and drove down to the garden.

We arrived after breakfast, and were shocked at how quickly weeds grow if you let them.

So we hoed and raked and hoed and hoed... And finally we were able to set out the plants and get started.

I planted while Kurt weeded, watered and carried buckets of mulch. Back to the left of Kurt next to that wooden thing is a "Little House on the Prairie" type water pump. It seriously gets your muscles working. I give Laura Ingalls credit.

Once the plants got in the ground and were mulched, it started to look like a real garden.

Here's Kurt carrying more mulch!

Notice the neighbors' plastic-covered gardens? Yesterday, several of them shared with us the "best" way to plant/mulch/take care of weeds/etc, which we found pretty annoying (since it's pretty much the opposite of how we want to do things), and a couple of them were making fun of one of our other neighbors who wasn't there because apparently he's a lazy gardener. I think I thought that the gardens would be a kind of peaceful, communal, accepting place where everyone was friendly, but I guess it's just a bunch of regular people - of all types. We decided that we shouldn't let it get on our nerves, for our own benefit, otherwise we'll just end up angry and upset. Our garden will be a peaceful and friendly place. See how happy I am? This is after 4 hours of work!

Sunday, today, was great. All of the plants, which were a bit droopy yesterday had perked up, and our neighbors, Ron and Janice, who remind me of my childhood neighbors Mae and Paul, were very chatty and funny, and laughed a lot.

We laid out newspapers along the pathways, watered them, then sprinkled straw down and mulched around the garden beds to keep weeds at bay.

Things we learned today:

1. When choosing between hay and straw, note that hay has seeds and straw does not.
2. Mice can get pressed into straw bales.
3. The farmer down the road sells a giant bale of straw for $5.00, instead of 3 mini-bales that we got for $12.50
4. Wet mulch is way heavier than dry mulch.
5. (still not sure about this one) Priming the pump means pouring water into the top of the pump when it seems to go dry. I guess this creates more suction or something.
6. Jeans can get really dirty

Check out the before and after:

Before (Saturday AM):

After (Sunday afternoon, about 8 hours of work later):