Prepping the Soil

After Guy, our Groundskeeping Guru, told me he'd salvaged bags of soil for the garden, it was simply a matter of toting them to the raised beds.  Between the two of us and a wheeled cart we brought enough soil and compost and mixtures of the two to refurbish our planting medium.  

It was a good thing that so many scholars were willing to get dirty.

First came removing the remaining plants, stunted vestiges of what they might once have been, had COVID not intervened.  

Not everyone was on board with killing what, to my eye, were weeds. Thankfully, the girl whose dad told her that what I thought was a small white carrot was, in fact, ginger, stepped right in to make it feel okay.   After collecting several small specimens and displaying them on the edge of the bed, she chose to pose like this:

The searching and the wondering - is this a gingerbread? - and the presentation of the treasure to our resident expert was a delightful distraction from thoughts of death and destruction.

Later in the day, a Gardener found this one, which was sending out many more roots than seemed appropriate to its discoverer.

After that, rocks, roots, twigs, bark, and feathers were excavated and transferred to the garbage bag. 

 Sometimes, a trowel worked well.

Sometimes you had to get in there with both hands.

And sometimes the temptation of two little boys, two plastic trowels, and a newly tilled and de-clodded pile of soil is just too much to resist.

The two fisted flinging only lasted a second or two, but the giggles went on for a while.  In general, it was a pretty wonderful day.