Luckily, I remembered City Rent A Truck from back in my Nadler Publishing days; they fixed me up with a cargo van that held everything I really needed that day for $50 including 100 free miles. Well, plus the gas I used, they give it to you with a quarter tank and expect it back with the same.
Before I bicycled everywhere I could get away with, I really didn't pay any attention to the price of gas. I saw it as an inelastic expense, since I didn't just drive around aimlessly. But in terms of my moving expense for the garden, the gas tacked on $35. I also wouldn't have previously thought much of making a separate trip to Home Depot to get the lumber for the new frames, but between feeding a gas guzzling Econoline and trying not to exceed that 100 mile limit, I made a point of connecting my dentist appointment, the home improvement store, and managing the whole affair to drive the fewest miles possible.
I found a shell in my yard while loading up shovels and rakes and implements of destruction. Such a bizarre thing to find in the middle of a back yard in Kansas, still hinged.
After we unloaded the van and drove it back to City, we bicycled home. Then on Sunday, after the girls were scooped up by the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster for Mother's Day, I went over to commence building the new frames.
A neighbor's sawhorse and my Dad's cordless drill made such short work of the frame construction I wanted to get more lumber and do even more frames. Corinna already had eight 4 x 8 raised beds; there were the three I had from last year and the three more I bought the materials for when we had the van rented.
We ordered four yards of compost from Missouri Organic. Well, the Poet Laureate ordered topsoil enriched with compost, but I'm a disciple of James Worley and I convinced her that compost, pure compost, was the thing.
This was what I tried to do last year, but I couldn't come up with a large enough order of compost to get Suburban to deliver or a friend with a pickup they weren't afraid to get 'stinky.'
I know, what's the point of owning a pickup if you're afarid to get the bed dirty hauling stuff, but there it is.
I secured 31 tomato plants (and a dozen peppers, three basils) from Worley and when the truck from Missouri Organic dumped his stuff in the driveway, I was beside myself.
We moved most of the four yards into the beds, topping them up. Then to stretch the SRM film, then to transplant, then to water-in.
I created an elaborate map of the new Tomatosaurus Rex, which occupied nearly five of the six new beds in our newly collective back yard (leaving nine beds for other stuff, for the record).
Corinna suggested that we might want to grow something besides tomatoes, and when I explained that we were talking twenty-five kinds of tomatoes, and started blathering about how this variety and that variety came out for me last year, she finally just laughed, kissed me and told me she was glad I was into gardening.
We had some transplant accidents, obvious stress to plants, but mostly it went smoothly. Except that compost was hot. As in, when I dug the holes for transplant, my hands didn't want to be in the hole.
Last year, my whole gardening adventure was fraught with insecurity. I was certain I'd fail in abject ways, then I had nothing but success. Lost a couple of plants to cutworms, but basically I had a bumper crop and great luck all the way around.
This year, I'm wondering (as I see the transplants wilt) if I was full of predicted success that will turn to ashes in my mouth.
No. I won't even entertain the possibility. Besides which, if it turns out our six new beds are hotter than the hinges hanging off the gates of Hell and have thus doomed my precious heirloom tomatoes, there are the eight beds from before. And I think it's an encouraging sign for our Swiss Chard and whatnot that the earthworms we found turning these old beds were snakelike.
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