I went to Home Depot and picked up peat moss, garden soil, manure (which smelled awfully chemical-y when I opened it), a shove, and a rake. I used four pine boards recovered from the box in which the TV was shipped to create a small raised box, and laid it out near the corner of the garden. I put down cardboard, soil, mulch (since I dont have wood chips) and then manure. I should have done soil, cardboard, mulch, good soil, and manure.

I was able to put some plants in the new mixture. I sliced up some of the big leaves of the tulips and used those on the ground under the cardboard. Planting was fun. I wet the soil big time so the new plants would have plenty to drink.

The garden hose was way too long. Water would gush from the spigot and all over the side of the house. I concluded the hose pressure was too high and the faucet was working too hard to push water through the hose. So I unraveled the hose as best I could and laid it out along the ground down the slope so that gravity would do most of the work of “pulling” the water through the hose and the house would have to do very little work to get the water out. I ended up slicing the hose where it was long enough to water the entire back yard. Too bad about the extra wasted hose.

I planted basil, lavender, tomatoes, a pepper, lemon balm, nasturtium, some type of flower whose name I forgot. It felt good putting them in the ground.

Planting and learning by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International