Cleaning up the garden

I took a stab at cleaning up the raised garden beds yesterday. Sam and I went to Costco and got potting soil and blueberry bushes; and of course I found leather gloves and MiracleGrow on a good price so ended up with those too. Oh and I got a 3 pack of organic tomato plants that looked really healthy.

Since Costco only had potting soil, we had to stop by HD to get the garden soil and I ended up getting a bag of soil conditioner to put in with the blueberry bushes since they are getting planted along the fence where it is a little clayish (or whatever the form of that word would be to describe clay soil).

After Sam fidgeted through his nap when we got home we went out and ground up the leaves I had put on top of the raised beds with the electric shredder/chipper. It didn't go too well since the leaves were half decomposed sitting over the winter on top of the soil, under landscape fabric; it really gummed up the shredder. I did the best I could to do the dryer, less composted leaves and left the mucky bits to just mix in the soil.

In the process of going through the leaves, I found that there was quite a bit of lava rock from under the cherry trees where we took the leaves from. So along with the lava rock that was under the leaves, as I was breaking up the soil and finding that it was quite sticky with clay and fortunately full of wonderful worms, I ended up pulling a small pail full of rocks out of the soil too.  I hadn't had a sifter to sift the soil from the yard I had put in there and it had a lot of rock in it; but how has much less and should be easier to dig in now. Luckily I do have a dirt sifter now, so I will be able to keep the

The first bed was topped off with a half bag of garden soil from last year before Aimee called me in for dinner. So I covered it back up with the landscape fabric and went inside with Sam to clean up and get ready to go to our Birth to Three Thrilling Three's class. BTW, we had a great time and it should be fun to get to know the 6 of the 7 other families we didn't know from previous classes; (that sounded like we wouldn't have fun with Tara and Scott, who we know from previous classes, but it now what I meant).

Now to wait out the rain and get that first bed mixed up and the second one started. At least we have the veggie starts conditioning to outside started today so we should be able to plant them in a couple days. I figure I can start working on the third raised bed while I wait for the weather to clear up this weekend; getting a dust port built for the planer and planning the deck boards to clean up the weather wear from the old deck. I just have to figure out how to build the dust port, which I guess will be easier when I get the planer dug out from underneath my workbench.