apparently, i'm a gardener

well, pioneer katie has made a rare spring-time appearance.  usually, she emerges only during wood-burning season, but it looks like her existence is going to be year-round.  

chuck and i decided that this would be the summer for a vegetable garden.  good idea, right?  finally, our kids are all old enough that i can work in the yard without having to watch them every moment.  we've been in our house for four years now... so the essential "work" is done, and we're moving on to the "fun" stuff.  

no, i'm not naive.  i know a garden is work.  but, for someone who is finally enjoying being outside rather than dreading it, the thought of cultivating and maintaining a garden sounded appealing.  about a month ago, chuck and i talked about how much we wanted to take on and he decided that 50 sq. ft. would be adequate.  i thought that seemed kind of small...at the time.  shortly after that, he cleared the plot of grass and covered it with a tarp until i was ready to plant.  although it is a bit too early to plant, i figured i'd better get the ground ready, so i trekked out to lowes and picked up a 40 lb bag of pulverized lime (don't ask) and fertilizer.  

my plan was to break up the ground, spread the lime and fertilizer, and then add some topsoil - all in anticipation of the vegetable plants i'd be adding in a few weeks.  i figured that would take a half hour or so...

lucy took pictures while i worked.  i hit a bit of a snag, though, when my garden tool kept getting caught on roots.   

turns out, my very hard-working and rarely short-cut-taking husband (and i'm not being sarcastic) decided to prepare the garden by flipping over shovel-fuls of grass.  so, what looked like a plot of dirt, was really just an upside down lawn.  i dropped my garden rake, and - down on my hands and knees - proceeded to remove each sod clod... one by one.  that small 50 sq. ft. garden never seemed so big.  and as i dug with my hands, trying to rip out the sod, i couldn't help but think that chuck must have had a really good reason for doing it this way.  for the life of me, i still can't figure that out.

an hour and a half later, i was done - and covered in almost as much dirt as my garden.  my back and arms were sore.  my ankle was throbbing.  my knees were raw.  and i was a bit crispy (did i mention i decided to do this during the hottest part of the day?).  and, yet, i felt incredibly accomplished.  

you can see how much sod is there on the tarp.  i wasn't really sure what to do with it.  but, that's ok - i'm not planning on doing a thing with it.  any guesses whose job that will be?  haha...