One and a half cubic metres of dirt

Anyone who has been to our house and been out back cannot failed to have noticed what we've fondly dubbed "the swamp" - a long, defunct water feature added by a past owner, long since dried up and no longer functional. The main purpose it served these days was to catch and hold foetid water whenever it rained, and act as a top-notch breeding ground for mosquitoes in the summer and spring.

Last week, we finally bit the bullet, and started making arrangements to rectify this eye-sore. All the plastic lining was cut up and removed, not to mention the decrepit machinery and tubing that was rotting at the bottom. The idea was that we would fill it up with soil, and establish a nice garden bed in its place. For that though, we needed to ensure that we had adequate drainage, otherwise it would quickly become a marsh rather than the garden we wanted. And alas, we came to a bit of a road block at that point, in the form of a layer of bricks covered with a sandy top layer.

So this week, aided by my beautiful assistant, we attacked the layer of sand and bricks with a shovel and crow-bar respectively, and managed to get them all removed by lunchtime. And underneath? Plain, old fashioned dirt (as opposed to the bed of mortar that we were fearing) - hooray!

So all was fine to start dumping in some extra soil to top it up. Which was great, because as it happened, a nice man from the soil and brick store had been over that morning and dumped a massive pile of earth on our driveway!

At that point, the beautiful assistant declared that she'd become quite tired with all of her helping, leaving me the relatively minor task of shifting 1.5 m³ of soil from the front yard to the back. And in the grand scale of things, it didn't really take all that long either!

Next up on the task list is to get some fertilizer and mulch, and choose some suitable plants to put in our nice new mini-garden bed!

But we're done for this weekend, and I gotta say, the beer I awarded myself at the end of the day never tasted so good!

PS. Go Hawks!!!