I love weekends like this one has been. It was a three-day weekend for me (hooray for federal holidays), and we couldn't have asked for better weather for what my husband and I were able to get accomplished on our homestead.
We have been trying to prepare multiple garden beds this winter so they will be ready for planting in 2017. It's the first January/February since I bought this property that I haven't been getting ready for our wedding (2015) or pregnant (2016), so I've been anxious to give this fledgling project the proper attention it deserves.
We've been making compost here on the homestead for adding organic matter to the soil, but we haven't been able to make a large enough quantity for what we need to turn lawn into garden beds. But we found our solution, and it's free! Our county in which we live has a recycling center, and it's free to pick up wood chips that result from the tree-trimming along the roadways that the county conducts on a periodic basis. Because the chipped branches are from the roadways, they should be relatively free of pesticides and herbicides.
So, we packed up our baby, two tarps, rope, shovels, and plastic buckets in our truck and high-tailed it to the recycling center. We knew we were going to load up some wood chips, but what we didn't know, was that we were going to find free gold while we were there! OK, not really gold, but the garden equivalent. At the back of the ginormous pile of wood chips, we found wood chips that had aged to a beautiful stage of compost! The wood chips were soft and absorbent, and had begun to break down into rich dirt, evidenced by the new plants growing here and there on this fertile medium....and here it was, just waiting for us to shovel it up and take it by the truckload to our garden beds. Oh yeah, we will definitely be going back for more.
After eating a delicious meal at one of our favorite burger joints and running a couple errands, we arrived home and continued our productivity. We finished setting up the second half of our dog's new pen (another project that's been on the books for over a year), put some compost in our soon-to-be herb bed, burned a pile of branches and an old tree stump, and talked about future plans.
The next day, we test drove a SUV we are interested in purchasing, which is yet another project we've been working on completing. Then we bought some fruit trees, raspberry bushes, perennial bushes and flowers, and a lavender plant. When we got home, we planted five of the seven fruit trees and mulched them with compost and mulch we picked up the previous day. We also planted the lavender and the dianthus before the sun went down below the horizon.
Then today, we had a lazy morning and slept in until 11am (our bodies were a bit tired from all the physical labor - sad, I know). We went through two boxes of kitchen stuff and reduced our drinking glasses in the cupboards. We took these and other donations in to town and dropped them off at one of the thrift stores near us. We purchased a bike for our baby to grow into and some DVDs of some TV series we enjoy at said thrift store, and because we donated items, they gave us a discount on our purchase. We returned home after a lunch of the Monday special at one of our favorite chicken eateries, running a few more errands (clearance clothes are great, but even clearance prices add up *sigh*), and grabbing a quick bite for dinner. We then took care of evening chores, washed some dishes, purged a few more kitchen items for our next donation, fixed our daily milk kefir, and spent time together as a family.
If only every weekend could be such a wonderful mix of relaxation, productivity, time together as a family, and wonderful time spent outside working our little piece of God's creation!
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