I'll pay for this tomorrow...

Monday is usually my work day.  I work one day a week and am home for the rest.  I had a cancellation so I went home for a few hours in the middle of the day.  The weather has started taking a turn for the damp coolness that usually precedes the blasting heat of summer around here. 

 I figured I would hoe the beds I started last summer and fall.  It took all of 10 minutes to do this as the soil was the best I have ever seen.  Soft, crumbly, dark and rich, it will be the best food for our food.  I then decided it could maybe do with a little nitrogen from our chicken coop aka "chicken poo."  I went in with a bucket and extracted a mass of our deep litter from the past 6 months.  It was starting to mature to a nicely aged mass of fertilizer.  So I put one bucket on each of our raised beds.  

Then I figured I shouldn't stop there. 

 I opened the muck door in the back of the chicken coop that goes straight into the compost heap.  After 2 hours, I had finally cleaned out 6 months of weekly layering of chicken litter.  I also took the time to use some of the compost from last year and layered compost with chicken litter in order to get a lovely bacterial colony going in the heap.  Worms were everywhere in the deep layers about one foot below ground, a sure sign of healthy soil that has been produced.  

With the work all done, I jumped in the shower (I bet my afternoon clients were happy I did this!) and went to the local feed store.  There I bought a big compressed bale of peat moss for lasagna beds and mulching later in the season, and on a whim asked how much for a discarded pallet.  The pallet recycler gives them a dollar each so he'd give me the same deal.  I also got a few seeds that I saw and liked.  

With all that done, I went back to work, clean, energized, and hopeful about my garden.  But I knew after all the lugging, pushing, and tugging, I'd be paying for it the next day...

and boy o boy am I ever.