I got the lumber for 4 raised beds around February with grand plans to plant early spring crops like peas and lettuce. YAY!
Unfortunately it took me months to finish putting them together. Awww...
Finally I managed to free enough time one weekend to get them all assembled and ready to go! YAY!
However, once I DID get them put together, I discovered that it was immensely harder to fill them with dirt than I thought it would be since the ground was left super rough after the trailer was removed. All that rough ground made getting a wheelbarrow filled with heavy dirt ANYWHERE beyond my abilities. Awww...
One of my neighbors said they would use the local tractor to move the dirt for me - YAY!
Sadly the tractor broke down before this could happen. Awww...
I had always planted my seeds right around the frost-free date of April 15th and by now it was a month past that. I was starting to worry that maybe it was too late in the season to plant ANY of my veggies. When I looked it up, while it was too late for things like peas and lettuce most other things could still be planted with no problem, and a lot of the early spring things could be planted in the fall once things cooled down. It wasn't too late to have a garden this year after all! YAY!
Thus inspired, I tried filling the raised beds with dirt by hand in the time I had while the baby was napping, but it was a pretty limited amount of time and tossing 1 shovel-full of dirt at a time wasn't very efficient. I managed to fill 1 bed about 1/5 full for each back-breaking session. I calculated that it would take me about 3 weeks to fill the beds at this rate. Awww...
Around the time I was seriously despairing the tractor was fixed! YAY!
A neighbor came over that same day (perhaps picking up on my growing desperation) and filled my beds with dirt. That same night after I put the baby to bed I raced outside and planted the seeds for 1 of the beds. WHEW!
Sadly the other 2 beds require trellising materials, which I don't have yet. I don't want to plant the seeds without knowing exactly where the trellis will go, so I'll have to wait on that. I tried to make a homemade trellis with saplings and zip-ties, but the zip-ties couldn't keep things tight enough for it to stay upright. Awww....
So I'm slowly making progress. I'm a very goal-oriented person and it's hard to adjust to a more laid-back, it'll-happen-eventually viewpoint. It's hard not to be frustrated that things I would have been able to accomplish in a weekend pre-baby are now taking months, but I could probably use the practice in being patient.
In the meantime I'm just trying to focus on all the wonderful progress that HAS been made :-)
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