Crazy Garden Work

The amount of work going on in the garden here has been insane the last couple weeks.  I worked away from home managing a campground for ten years, from the last snow in the spring to the first snow in the fall basically, and in that time my garden went back to sod.  What a job it is trying to reclaim it!  That is my excuse/reason for not posting anything for a couple weeks.

The first job I accomplished is represented in these feed bags - completely useless work that should never have been there to do.  Someone (God bless his little heart) thought he was being helpful by taking all the bags I had filled when I cleaned the chicken house the last two times and dumping them in my garden in a pile.  Noooooo!!  Chicken poop is way too "hot" to just go into the garden like that, not to mention all the weed seeds it contains.  So, I spent a whole day digging it all up, scraping it together and then refilling the bags so I can drag it off to a compost pile to age for a couple years.

These photos are the "before pictures".  See what I mean about it reverting to sod?  Not just grass either but very stubborn wild prairie grass.  So, all this long grass was laying dead all over the garden and I got my whipper-snipper out and cut it all down.  I threw it over the fence to the horse and she seemed to appreciate it - looked like hay to me.  After that, much as I hate doing it, I sprayed all the grass to kill it.  There is just no way I could win a summer long fight against the grass unless I had some sort of edge. 

Today I started roto-tilling the beds but we had a massive downpour this week and the earth is too wet and just kept balling up in the tiller.  Hopefully tomorrow it will have dried a bit and I can try again.  This is another view of the garden "before".  Sadly, there are no "after" photos yet because the work isn't done but I have high hopes that I will have the garden back in shape and can show that soon.  

Our growing season here is very short, usually less than 100 days from last frost to first frost and the May long weekend is traditionally when people put their gardens in here.  The May long weekend was early this year so I am comforting myself with the thought that if I get it in this weekend then I am still on track.  Wish me luck!

So, wondering about that weird structure in the garden?  My husband is building a greenhouse for me from two of the frames from tarp garages.  He has a huge roll of reinforced plastic to go on as soon as he has the raised beds built in there.  Hopefully that gets accomplished this weekend too but everything seems to be working against us.  He had to run down to my daughter's house for the day today to help her fix her roof.  The massive downpour I mentioned earlier had her setting pails all over to catch the water dripping inside her house.  Daddy to the rescue!

Here it is... one last sad look at how dismal the state of my garden is.  Fingers crossed that it doesn't look like this much longer.