works in progress.

This, my friends, is how much sleeve you (where by you, I mean me, or someone with comparably long, skinny arms) can get out of 1 skein of Cascade 220:

Approximately 1.5 sleeves. I’ve since finished the sleeves, and have moved on to join them to the body, so expect a post about that, soon. But what I really wanted to post about is a work-in-progress that isn’t knit. You can see some of it in that photo above.

This weekend, we decided to tackle one of the beds in our garden. This is the same bed my parents helped us tackle when they were here last summer, but because we didn’t get weed cloth and mulch laid down, the weeds came back with a vengeance this year. This is what we were up against:

This stuff covers every surface of our garden. It has an insane system of roots and runners, and can come back strong just from the tiniest snippet left behind. We wanted to put a raised-bed veggie garden in (yes, it’s a bit late, so we probably won’t be planting a whole lot this year, but at least we’ll have the setup ready next year), so we needed to clear one of the beds (we’ll clear them all eventually). This required digging. Lots and lots of digging. Most of which I did on my own, while my husband ran out to Lowes to pick up some necessary supplies. It was exhausting.

But, after a long day of hard work for both of us, look what we accomplished:

It’s still definitely a work in progress; we need to lay down more pebble, and some edging, and we need to get some compost mix to put in our boxes before we plant anything. We’re going to be starting our own compost operation soon, too, but we haven’t yet. We’re excited about it, though, because we buy so little packaged stuff that most of our trash is food waste (like, ends of carrots and celery, things of that nature), and it just makes so much more sense to compost it than to let it get all stinky in the trash can (which takes us forever to fill).

But for now, I am quite pleased with our progress, even though it left me basically unable to walk for a couple of days, thanks to overly sore muscles and my bad back. I’d say it’s the last time I’ll forget that I am no longer super marathon-running girl, but that’s probably not true. I’m too stubborn for my own good.

Well, anyway, consider this the first of hopefully several garden updates this summer. Wish us luck!