light enough to travel: Spring Digging.

Spring is finally here! Every Saturday in spring should be like today--a little cloudy, warm enough to have all the windows open and let the cat smell the outdoor breeze coming through the house, nothing particular on the agenda to take me away from a lazy breakfast and enjoying being in my home.

Spring break was less than spring-like, and also less than break-like for me--I spent spring break working at my law firm job in Topeka and trying to get ahead on the semester's writing and research projects. But I had spring on my mind and a little bit of free time on my hands, so I decided to build myself a garden.

Until the dirt started flying, this was really only a partially formed idea. Our back patio is built over what used to be a brick driveway. The area between the patio and the street is the sunniest part of the property we live on, but was only about an inch of soil and grass on top of bricks.

Cj and I had talked about how cool it would be to have raised beds in that area, but had so far been deterred by the bricks, hours of manual labor, and expenses standing in our way. But we came up with a relatively low-cost idea for building our raised beds, and I decided it was time to find out just how much brick-moving and manual labor was involved.

I started by gathering and stacking all the rocks and bricks that were mixed in with the soil on the surface. Then I found the edges of the brick paving and decided the layout of potential raised beds.

Then I started digging up the bricks,
followed by more carrying and stacking:

Meanwhile, I was gradually scooping up the thin layer of soil to expose those super cool Lawrence Kansas paving bricks around the outside of the garden area...

Cj and I paid a visit to the City of Lawrence composting facility this morning on "Load-your-own Day" of the annual compost sale and got some morning exercise and a truckbed full of steaming compost. Here's Cj mid-scoop at the compost mound, before a friendly hippie loaned us a second shovel so that we could scoop simultaneously:

We visited Cottin's Hardware to find some two-foot long rebar segments and chicken wire for the raised bed structure:

And then started filling in our new raised bed with compost and dirt from the excavation. It doesn't look like much yet but just picture it with plants all over... to be continued.