Moving the Garden

Well, time seems to fly, and in the meantime I did a terrible job with the blog. I am going to try and really get into it this year and I'm going to start by catching you up on some things we accomplished in 2018.

From the first time she visited, my Grandmother told me where the garden belonged - the Northwest side of the property. It gets good light, is sheltered, and is close to the house. Of course we didn't listen to her and put the garden on the other side of the house. I usually listen to my Grandparents, but I had visions of the keeping a portion of the yard in grass to goof around on. Plus, we reasoned, we can always move the garden if we want.

It's true, of course, you can move a garden. But it's terrible, hard work, even with the help of my poor parents who do more physical labor in their retirement than I'm sure they care to. In any case, we were successful and are very happy with both our new garden and the way the old garden looks covered in grass.

Steps to move a garden:

1. Select new garden area and mark it.

2. Rent a sod cutter and get to work. Roll up the layers, put them in a wheelbarrow and push them to your old garden area to be unrolled and start a new life. When no one can physically manage to push the wheelbarrow any longer, back your truck up to the new garden and load the sod rolls into the back, then drive them to the old garden site!

3. Unroll the sod onto your old garden soil. Make sure that the ground is level and that you have wet the earth. We also tilled the garden to make leveling easier.

4. Repeat until the garden is moved!

This process took us several days. We wanted to move quickly so we didn't kill the sod, but the rolls were heavy and Jake and I both have day jobs, so we could only get a few hours in after work before it got dark. I think we started on a Saturday and had filled in the old garden by the following Friday. After all that hard work though, the garden is moved...to the spot where Grandma said it should have been in the first place!