Deconstruction Weekend

I have had the great good fortune to be married to a most patient man.  To say he indulges me is a vast understatement.  This weekend's labors in the orchard garden proved this yet again.

We pulled out a vegetable bed in the center that had never done very well and was hard to navigate around.  Then Bruce dragged up the railroad ties and began putting together a new raised bed to the side of where the old one had been.  It was in the process of nailing in the chicken wire on the bottom, earlier this week, that he bashed his finger. 

The project was going along slowly, but steadily.  And then I took another long look at my new garden design...and hated it.  The bed was causing the path to have to make a sharp angle around it.  So I meekly suggested to Bruce that we might try to shove the bed down about six inches.  Saint that he is, he only grumbled a little and shoveled back out the dirt that so recently shoveled in.  Next the chicken wire came out and then, with straps and a crowbar, we slid the thing down the hill six inches. 

And it looked a little better.  But then it hit me that the bed needed to be shoved eight feet farther down.  Bruce barely twitched an eyebrow and we set to work.  In the midst of all of this, our neighbor, Leo, came with his Bobcat tractor and his young sons to auger post holes for the new gates that we'll be putting around the garden.  Men, boys, every tool we owned, heavy equipment, bags of cement and piles of posts -- all in the area around my little orchard garden.  The wire fence was snipped open in the three locations that the gates were going to go.  My garden was a wreck.

The supervisors

                                                                                      


As the sun went down and it grew dark, we kept at it.  Finally, as a lovely almost-full moon rose in the east, we called it a day and trudged back up to the house.

I look forward to seeing what things look like in the morning light.