Revitalizing the north side

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Today was a heavy-lifting day. We spent a good three hours trying to overhaul the north side of our plot -- the area we've been referring to as the ghetto. That's where we've been storing miscellaneous supplies such as extra boards, stakes, a roll of fence, a bag of mulch, and a half-empty bag of sand. It's like the "garage" area of the plot. The north side is also where I plant many of my summer flowers and, up until now, I've pretty much neglected that area since I've been focused on the spring plants.

Michael, with pickaxe in hand, took out the garage and extended the tomato bed to reach the back fence. Meanwhile, I was expressing a few choice words as I tried to hack through the wire grass that was encroaching from the plot north of us. (Yes, the wire grass is coming at us from all angles, except from Brad's plot on the west, because he overhauled his soil completely last year.) I dug out all the grass I could, then filled in the path along the fence with newspaper and two loads of wood chips.

Michael also took out the walkway we had and used the stones to build a little patio. It looked like he was doing some serious calculating there for a while to get all the rectangular stones to fit into a square pattern. (Better him than me.) It's barely big enough for the two of us to sit on, but it's really nice. He even finished it off by filling in the spaces with sand. Now we're calling this our back porch.

With these renovations, we now have a lot more space for the tomatoes and for more flowers. We sifted about two wheelbarrows full of soil and placed it on the flower bed and around some of the vegetables. All in all, it was a lot of work, but it feels great to have that part of the plot in better shape.