Garden Expansion 2007

Yesterday my wonderful husband rented a sod cutter and tiller and cut out a new perennial border and expanded the vegetable garden for us. Hopefully you can tell from this photo that the yard is still a bit messy…that bench in the middle of the lawn doesn’t belong there, and our friend is coming over to pick up the rolls of sod that we stripped. Over the weekend we outlined the areas we wanted to remove the sod from with an old can of spray paint. We could see that the soil over by the vegetable garden is mostly sand and clay, but at the back of the yard along the fence, the soil looks loamy. This is only “phase one” of this expansion project…”phase two” happens this weekend, hopefully, when we have a load of triple mix delivered to amend the new beds. Over the last two years we have added eight yards of triple mix to the beds in our yard and we’ll probably start with six more this weekend. In a subdivision like ours, the soil is very poor, mostly clay, and contains bits of building materials left over from backfilling after the construction was completed. We’re fortunate to have some wedding money left to use to improve our soil. Once we’ve added the triple mix to the soil, I’ll start moving perennials out of the greenhouse pots and from other spots in the yard to the new perennial border. That will be the fun part.