2023 Life Logs, Day 102: Undoing Five Years of Garden Building
Date: Wednesday, April 12, 2023
Weather: Sunny and Warm; High 72, Low 47 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
The weather today was incredible. I started the morning in a polar fleece and had to quickly come back inside and put on a cotton shirt. Now that I see that the temperature got into the low 70’s today, I understand why I was hot!
Today was all about undoing the five years of garden building I have done here at the cottage. My plan was to disassemble all three raised beds and move them to the garden area at the house where I will be moving on July 1.
Well, it became evident early on that the goal was too mighty. It only took 30 minutes to take out all of the drip irrigation system but getting the garden soil out of the first raised bed proved to be a challenge. Peter and Karen Baranowski came over to help me. The top three inches of soil was easy to shovel out, but below that there was a massive root system that was almost impenetrable. By noon we had gotten half of the soil out of one bed, and we had filled all of our five gallon buckets and 10 gallon felt bags, so we delivered the drip irrigation tubing, the two bean towers, the wood from the 4 x 8 raised bed that was still usable, and the garden soil to its new home. I was able to assemble a 4 x 4 bed and fill it with the garden soil.
Peter and Karen headed home and I stayed to water the new grass that was planted after entryway landscaping was done recently. Lynda, the owner of the home I will be renting, is on vacation, and she asked me to water the newly planted grass in the entry area while she is gone. She just had a landscaper ‘remake’ the entry area with stone walking paths and plants, so I am happy to water the area that I will be using every time I walk from the parking area to my new front door. I then went home to have lunch before continuing to hack away at the root system and finally get the area back to grass level.
I took another load of bagged soil to the new garden and called it a day. I don’t mind working hard, but hacking through the root system was back breaking work that I don’t care to continue. Lynda and I will just have to buy new raised beds and organic soil.
Thank you, thank you, to Peter and Karen.
