Yards of soil

Friends, today I belatedly announce the arrival of ten square yards of soil in our driveway. Yes, indeed, ten yards of top-quality, deep black, compost-smelling soil found themselves in front of our carport on Monday afternoon.

Many of those yards were destined for our nascent garden. (About five of them, if you want to be exact about it.) Do you have a guess as to who volunteered to transport it to our garden plot? Little ol' me!

Little ol' me made a discovery: soil is heavy. It's heavy in the shovel, it's heavy in the cart, and it's especially heavy in the cart when you're pushing it through mud.

Nearly halfway through the pile!

If you live 'round these parts, you'll know that things have been getting less muddy for the past couple days. We have been blessed with a few days of sunshine, and can reasonably expect two or three more. In fact, we very reasonably can expect our soil to dry out enough to till it and form it into our garden beds! That's why I spent six hours shoveling, carting, dumping, and distributing soil yesterday, and about three more today. Tomorrow will see me rototilling that good stuff in. If I feel up to it after that, I'll start shoveling soil from the walking paths up onto the garden beds to raise them for improved drainage. If not, I'll do it Friday. And Saturday? If the garden beds are done, I'll be planting! Hallelujah, it's finally happening!

I'll also be starting some logs for mushroom cultivation (shiitakes! oysters!) on Saturday with our neighbor, who happens to be one of the best neighbors I've ever had. He's not just super friendly. He also is doing most of the things that I want to do. He has chickens, rabbits, sheep, and pigs. He has a garden. He grows mushrooms. He's probably coming to Burning Man with us. And he owns the house, so he'll be sticking around for a good long while. Hooray!

Here's a cute neighbor story: Awesome Neighbor (known as AN) came over to our house. Looking out our kitchen window, AN spied a particularly nasty exotic invasive weed known as Japanese Knotweed. He expressed his sympathy and wished us the best in our eradication efforts. I hadn't encountered it before, so I looked it up after he left. I confirmed his identification-- yup, definitely Japanese Knotweed. But what's that, Wikipedia? Did you say that it's edible? And that it's a lot like rhubarb and makes a pretty decent jam?

I harvested a laundry basket of Japanese Knotweed, tore the leaves off, peeled the stems, gave them a rinse, chopped them up, and treated them like tasty jam-makings. After more time in the kitchen than I'd like to admit (this was my first solo jam-making), I had seven jelly jars and a couple overflow containers of knotweed-and-orange jam. It's tangy (hopefully in a good way), and it didn't jell quite right (it was my first time!), but it's totally edible. I had it on a PBJ for lunch today. As the best ending of this story, I walked myself over to AN's house, presented him with a jar of knotweed jam, and thanked him for identifying the plant for me in the first place.