Planter Box Project (Continued)

Yes, that's my pregnant wife shoveling dirt.  The horror!

I built 10 planter boxes for Aimee to plant a garden, but we didn't want to buy potting soil to fill them all, because that would be terribly expensive.  Aimee and I went to Britt's Garden Acres outside of Manhattan, KS and ordered six cubic yards of top soil from them.  It's not as nutrient-rich (and therefore black) as potting soil, but it's a heck of a lot better than the nutrient-void, yellowish-tan clay in our yard.

I had the truck driver dump the dirt on our front lawn.  Eli and Jer-Bear, of course, immediately wanted to play on the dirt pile.  It may be worth the cost and effort to buy them a dirt pile just for play, if only I could get it delivered directly to the back yard so I don't have to move it there myself.

Speaking of which, we moved loads of dirt to the planter boxes with the wheel barrow.

Candace was the official dirt spreader with the rake.

These photos are from Friday.  You wouldn't think it from looking at the sky, but we got rained out after filling only two boxes.  We continued the job on Saturday, after it stopped raining, and finished it on Sunday.

I used some of the leftover dirt to fill in where our soil receded from the foundation.  I was surprised we had any leftover dirt.  I really thought I'd underestimated how much we'd need.

In the photo bellow, you can see Aimee already planted two blueberry, and two raspberry bushes she had ready to go in pots.  We worked in some potting soil here to give them a better shot.  You can also see in the background the new plum tree that replaced our dead one.  Hopefully this one will fare better.

We had some landscaping fabric laying around, so Aimee covered some of the boxes to prevent weeds from growing.

This is all that's left of our dirt pile.  Isaiah spread it out as much as possible with a rake.  I think we'll have one really nice spot of grass in the front yard next year.

You can see our apple trees in the photo above.  Despite some trouble with disease, these two produced a whole bunch of apples this year.  Their pitiful little branches were bent low with apples.  We had four apple trees, but two died because of disease.  Hopefully these are strong enough now that they'll continue to fight off any disease in the future.  I have no idea why that one plum tree in the back yard grew so much better than all our other trees.

I suppose this project isn't really done until we plant some veggies, but that'll have to wait until next year.