The new garden was begun in January 2023. The garden area was the leavings of my awful neighbor who had varying success with a small plot. I took down his makeshift, partly constructed landscaped net cover and removed the ugly picket fence around two sides of it. Next, the four by fours which acted as a gate to the ugly area, made uglier by the fact that he had started a firepit in the middle of the area.
I removed the leftover burned wood and some metal in the heap and filled the hole. The next day I raked most of the leaves from the plot and enlarged it to around twenty-one feet by twenty-seven feet. I strung a perimeter out of twine.
Then I began tilling. This was made less difficult by the former tenant having removed most of the vegetation using my tiller, and at least some of the roots from nearby trees. But, there were a few inches down long ones nearly an inch thick. After a few hours and a couple stops for untangling the remaining weeds from the tiller tines, the garden area began to be a garden.
Next came the mushroom compost. I wanted at least an inch or more covering the whole area. This amounted to two heaping truckloads of the stuff, two cubic yards at $36 a load.
These were spread out and leveled roughly after drawing boundaries to about where each pile would stretch. These were tilled in four runs at a time while my friend Sandi leveled them neatly with a wide rake. Then these were watered three hours nightly for a few days to allow the compost to mix with the soil.
Bought 14 furring strips for $25 at Lowes (@ 1.68 each).
