Ready, set...

...Go?

I think today might be the day. Planting time. I still need to finish filling the beds, but I have a good feeling that seeds might go in the ground today. Here's what's been going on the past few days:

On Sunday, Alex and I borrowed a shovel, rake, mattock, and wheelbarrow from our neighbor and started digging. We leveled out the beds and sunk them a few inches into the ground, loosening up the soil and pulling out the weeds in the process. The soil here is very sandy and soft, so all of this was surprisingly easy, which was nice. Also, we discovered that there used to be a tree in the middle of the yard, and it's roots are still buried and not fully decomposed. By the time we were done we had a nice little pile of them that we'd pulled out.

This was the result:

It was so satisfying to turn the earth and get my hands in the dirt. It feels so grounding and nurturing, not to mention exciting when I imagined the plants that will grow there. It's really starting to look like a garden now in a way that it hasn't before. There's something solid and sturdy about it that was missing when the beds were just sitting there on the grass (or on the oak leaves and clover; we don't have much actual grass here).

Then two exciting things happened yesterday: first, the last of my seeds were delivered. I'd been waiting on my backordered arugula seeds from Johnny's, and my Dad said he was sending me basil and cilantro seeds (and a croquet set, just for the fun of it. Thanks Papa!). Both those packages came yesterday.

And the second exciting thing is that I got my topsoil! In the late afternoon I got a call from the dirt guy, saying if I was available in an hour, he could meet me at his landscaping place and I could get my stuff. An hour later, I pulled into the gravel lot and backed my truck up to the pile of lovely, dark brown, slightly sandy topsoil. Steve the dirt guy hopped out of his skid loader, took a look at the topper covering the bed of my truck and asked, "How were you planning on getting this stuff in there?" I smiled cheerfully and said, "Well, I brought I shovel..."

Usually Steve just uses the skid loader to dump the desired amount of material into a person's truck, but my topper prevented him from do that. So instead, he scoped up a load of dirt and drove it over to my truck, so I could just shovel it straight from there and not have to bend over so much. This made it much easier than it would have been if I'd been shoveling straight from the pile.

We chatted while I worked. I told him about Wisconsin, and he told me about how his family has lived in this area for generations. His grandfather ran a hardware store in town that was one of the first in the area to accept credit, back before there was such thing as a credit card. He said his grandfather would just write down the person's name and how much they owed in a notebook that got locked up in the safe every night, and they paid him back when they could.

At one point, Steve's cell phone rang. He answered it, and presumably the person on the other end asked him what he was doing at the moment, because he replied "Well, right now I'm sitting here watching a young lady shovel dirt into her truck." That made me laugh. He sounded a little guilty that he wasn't helping, but he'd already apologized that he didn't have a second shovel. I told him it was fine, this was my workout for the day. (I didn't mention that I'd already done a couple hours of aerial training that morning.)

Neither of us knew what 17 cubic feet of dirt really looked like, so I just guessed. When I asked Steve how much he would change for the pile I'd shoveled, he just smiled and said, "I bet you'll be back, so why don't you just pay for it then." Sometimes, people are wonderful. I told him I'd bring the money by if what I already had did turn out to be enough, then hopped into my significantly more weighted-down truck and drove the three blocks home.

So that's where things stand now. All that's left to do before planting is to shovel the topsoil out of my truck and into the beds, mixing in the compost as I go. This morning I dressed like my Dad does for farming: shorts, a baggy white long-sleeved shirt to keep the sun off, and a kerchief on my head to keep my hair out of my face. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and it's a beautiful day to be working outside. Life is good!