Because It Doesn't Rain On a Monday Night.

"Because it doesn't rain on a Monday night" was the best answer I could think to give our neighbors who wanted to know why I was blinding them with shop lights and dragging wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of compost into the garden at 8:00 in the evening.

Here in GA, we've gone from absolute, destitute, worst drought on record for a ridiculous number of years running to rain. Heavy, consistent rain every three or four days, and that three or four days just always seems to fall on the weekend. Always. However, it wasn't raining tonight, and the man was kind enough to fetch me a cubic yard of compost mix during his lunch hour today and I set out to begin to disperse it through the garden this evening.

Now, last year, the man bought me a wonderful gift. I'll wait why you go look. It was a thing of beauty, but I've never gotten the chance to use the tiller until now. HOLY GOODNESS. I didn't know what to make of a tiller for beds that are tauted to be 'no till' but that sucker tore right through that compressed bed and fluffed it all up so beautifully nice and pretty and I only think I killed myself once while trying to use it. It did a job in five minutes which would have taken me forever to do, and quite honestly, I'd never have loosened it up deep enough by hand.

I caught a flash in my eye while tilling and saw the man had snapped this shot. Look at the bed on the lower right (not the garlic bed) and compare it with the others. Look at how beautifully tilled it is. I was a happy girl.
My holiday gift this year was a wheelbarrow, but I still found out that you can't fill the wheel barrow half way and still expect to maneuver it down the hill to the garden. Yup. Forget the tiller, this, my friends, is how you die. Instead, you need to shovel only 10 shovel fulls and then take it down. Yes, it's tiresome, but it's better than carting it down shovel by shovel as I did last year.

So as it got darker, the shop lights came out and I worked a while longer. I only got about two hours of work in, but I did manage to till up and amend all of the beds in the corner yard.

Tomorrow I'm going to work on filling the boxes we just put the addition on and then if there's any left over I'll do the side yard. If not, a few bags from the store will do just fine. I had to leave it for tonight, however. Why, you ask? It's supposed to rain, of course.

The morning comes early, and thank goodness the Tylenol will be there to greet my sore back. Sweet gardening dreams.