I Wonder What I Could Accomplish In A Whole Day?

My new gym is in my garden. Weight machines are for the faint of heart - posthole digging kicked my butt today! Most folks would put the fence in before planting the garden, but we were running out of growing time so we got the garden in first. On Saturday our amazing friend Una dropped off several locust (rot resistant) logs culled from her own acreage in our driveway - while I napped with the kids right there in the car. Clearly a mother who remembers parenting toddlers, she just left the logs without waking me up.



Today I had some time while H-Mama tended the kids. With Pandora blasting Johnny Cash on my Blackberry in my pocket I got seven posts each sunk 2 feet deep in the field in about two hours. It is hard but very satisfying work. The decision to do it myself instead of the ever-tempting hiring it out is mostly about wanting to make my mark here on our homestead. I want to build a lovely, rustic, magical, fenced garden which feeds our family in years to come but is still delightful to behold, and I want to do it with my own hands.



I have another 35 or so posts to put in for this incarnation of the garden; eventually the fenced area will be five or six times this size and will encompass the orchard and berry beds. For now, I just want to give our veggies a fighting chance against the deer and other varmints.



Today I also managed to transplant two of our red currant bushes into the garden after stripping them of berries. If all goes as planned, their former location will be bulldozed and graded to become our kitchen patio on Wednesday. It is not a great time to move the bushes because they were covered in berries, but I want my French doors a lot more than I want those currants bushes. And now I have enough currants to whip up some jam or a pie.