As I mentioned in our Weekend Rewind post yesterday, we finally got the garden beds ready to plant over the weekend.

On Thursday night, Hubs and I labored over getting them in the ground, a processed detailed here.

Then on Friday night, my sister’s husband arrived with a trailer and a load of soil in tow. We’ve been planning this delivery for awhile and I was pretty excited with our soil arrived, courtesy of my dad.

He’d loaded up a pretty sweet mix of soil and compost for us.

We had some super rich, dark composted soil from a pond they’d cleaned out last year. You can tell how awesome it was by the smell. Hubs scooped this layer on top of the leaves and grass clippings, which we had raked up from our yard and piled in as our bottom layer. This will compost down and help provide nutrient-rich soil for our vegetables.

On top of that, we added some regular field dirt from one of their fields. He made sure it hadn’t been recently treated by anything chemicals that might harm our plants, of course.

This dirt is a little sandy and very fine, and it’s good, black dirt, so there is no clay or anything.  It is a bit clumpy right now, but we’ll mix it up well before we actually add our plants.

It was not a super fun morning, according to Hubs, who did a lot more shoveling than I did. Jeremy was also super helpful to have around because he could shovel way faster than me!

Near the top of that layer, we added a little sprinkle of lime to help balance the soil a bit. Then, we added the remaining dirt on top.

 

Pretty soon, the trailer was empty…

 

and the beds were full!

We are planning to add a few bags of Miracle Grow Garden Soil to add to the very top layer and mix it in as we are planting the seeds and seedlings.

We already picked up a few of our vegetable choices over the weekend, and then they all had to live inside while we weathered the storms.

I have high hopes for having the garden boxes crossed off the list by next weekend though.

We also spent a little time in the garage last night working on various projects so hopefully we’ll have some non-garden updates to share soon. (For those of you that are getting tired of hearing about our attempts at setting up a suburban backyard garden.

What are you working on that never seems to finish up? I feel like we’ve been working on these garden boxes forever! Tell us what’s taking a long time in your neck of the woods.