Landscaping and Strawberries

*The first of the strawberries were picked for my daughters oatmeal this morning.  She was so excited!  (She's been sneaking little bites off the not quite ready berries for days now.) Also fed the strawberries and blueberry plants yesterday. I can see the blueberries just starting to form.

*Compost was up to 125° yesterday!

*Landscaping is coming along slowly but surely.  We dug out 2 tons of dirt yesterday and found people through Craig's List that wanted fill.  We delivered.  People without trucks were loving us! 

The first ton went to an older couple living in a newer mobile home park, filling a new raised bed.  Apparently they built the park over an old quarry so the top soil was minimal at best and no large trees. They were building raised beds and very happy to have our nice fill dirt which for unamended dirt is pretty healthy soil actually. They tipped us $7 which I thought was really, really nice as we didn't expect anything at all. It paid for the gas so we were happy. =)

Our second run was to a young couple who'd just finished school and had moved into their own place and wanted to fill a garden bed they'd just built. They were also having a yard sale and had a few friends over and had cute puppies and a hamster and were generally really, really nice. They made our kiddlet a jelly sandwich and put on a movie on for her. So sweet. The woman also asked us what I thought was a funny question, "How come you're doing this? People don't just give stuff away, they always seem to want something for it. You don't want us to pay you for any of this?" I had to laugh! Of course we were getting something for it! We were getting room to build our patio and well, if it helped them out in the interim, all the better. Silly girl. lol

She did let me pick through some of her yard sale items and take them for free since she was going to box them all up and donate them in a few hours anyways. I took some Christmas ornaments and 2 yards of this cute girlie flannel to back my round robin quilt with. Perfect trade if you ask me.

I think we might try to do another load today - see if we can't hit up some of the other people who e-mailed us interested in crazy people that would just deliver dirt for nothin'!

Bed number six with the compost laid in! Note the large pile of dirt in the back ground behind the bed...


Pumpkins and squash planted for the season. This fall a semi-dwarf apple will go in there with some shade plants. Note the smaller dirt pile in the back ground.


So much more to do!