The deck removal/garden bed project is pretty much complete. After clearing away the decking we dug up the area. I quickly found that someone had devoted a great deal of concrete to making…I don’t know what. Every few feet I’d dig up another inverted gumdrop of concrete that served no purpose I could ascertain other than to annoy me. I now have the world’s largest concrete gumdrop collection!

The lot, when cleared, looked much like this:

In digging up the area, too, I came to realize this was not going to be choice garden soil. Much of it hadn’t seen water in years, and was little better than packed clay. I spread what compost I could get from our composters over the area and dug it in. It still looked rather rough and clumpy, but I started putting in dividers and marking out pathways before the final attempt to condition the soil a bit better.

Today, while I had my father-in-law still here to help (thanks, Dad!) I went to the home improvement store and bought 21 bags of compost. Two-thirds of it actually went around various trees in our yard, but the rest got spread over the new garden area. The kids joined in, and were actually rather helpful. It’s amazing how quickly five rakes can smooth out a garden.

Of course all we’d really done to this point is just cover over the clumpy, clay-ish soil. Next we dug it all in. Amazingly enough, it worked! The dirt smoothed right out! It’s still not perfect, and I’ll be surprised if anything grows all that well in it this year, but it’s a start. We’ve got leftover seeds we can use, so it won’t be that costly to see what we can get to grow. If it does well, every bit will help.

I’m glad the project is finally done–well, except for getting rid of the rest of the scrap wood and the concrete gumdrop collection. There are plenty of other things I can focus on now, like thinning the peaches.