I have long lived by the motto “Every boy needs a pickup truck”, and now the value of that phrase came alive. It was time to amend the soil.

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A garden is art. You’re blending color, shape, texture. You create illusions that trick the eye into following a certain line. A garden is art. And every aspect of a property needs to be examined for a fully successful garden.

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And, before we could plant anything, we had to amend the soil. Our neighbors didn’t know what was going on when we filled the entire front yard with buckwheat. For nitrogen. When it would get mature, which it did rather quickly, we tilled it under and planted more. 4 times. It made a difference. Plus, since I have a pickup truck, we bought load after load of mulch. Twice a year, our city gives it away. As much as you want. Since we had the front and back yard to do, we got tons of it. We still do from time to time. Soil amendment will be a post all to itself (eventually).

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Back to the books. This time it was books about planning gardens. Graphs. Maps. Color wheels and color charts. And you know what? I’m glad it turned out that way. This is our garden now. We designed it, we built it, we planted it. It’s ours. We’ve made a few mistakes. Okay, we’ve made a LOT of mistakes. We’ve gone through several ideas that were great ideas but just didn’t work. But that just made it even more “our” garden.

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It’s been my experience that, except for weekly mowing and the occasional barbeque, backyards are the sole province of dogs. We never see anyone using their yards. Even those that have swing sets only have children in them when the children have company (and only then for an hour or so). It seems like a waste.

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The first (and biggest) problem was that it was hard as a rock. Literally. The first time we used a roto tiller in the front yard, the tiller bounced. The blades couldn’t get into the soil, so the tiller just bounced up and down. What I thought was going to take a few hours of work (look at it! It’s a small front yard!), took three days. Three very long hard days. It was the beginning of what has come to be a continual drive to amend the soil.

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