One long weekend, sunshine, and several shovels full of dirt turned the giant mounds of compost pictured in my last post into this:

We actually expanded the garden a bit this year, so the first step was renting a sod cutter, and removing more grass. Then we spread the compost, amended the dirt with lime, rock phosphate, and green sand … and Chris tilled! This is only half of the garden – there’s still another pile to be dealt with.

We got a second arbor, which I put up this weekend along with some sections of the fence. It’s getting there… I’m hoping to find time to dig out the rows in this half (“my garden”) this week and start planting next weekend. Chris already has one row in “his garden” planted.

Last year, we amended our new, sandy garden with seven pickup truck loads of compost from the Free Compost Site in our county.

Since then, the truck was sold for $300 (it was worth nearly every penny, too…), we moaned and groaned about the sand, and had a mediocre garden.

One of my projects this year is growing luffa – sponge gourds. These need to be transpotted soon. I’m planning on growing them all in pots on our deck, so they can climb up the railings and hang down.