The New Back Garden...

... Is ready for plants now.  I started digging it in because I had 3 or 4 spare plants with no place to put them.  And, I wanted to attract birds, so I wanted a place to add a couple more trees.  I got the idea, drew it in and then dug out the outline in an afternoon.

It took two weeks, digging every single day.  Work is still insane, so some days I only had the energy for an hour or so.  And the ground is rock hard.  It's like digging cement, so I didn't make much progress at first.

Then, last weekend after we got a good soaking rain that softened it up a bit, I went out and dug the whole thing into big chunks.

I shook for the next four hours.

This week, I broke up the clumps of soil with my hands, put the soil in a pile and scraped about two inches of clay out from under what will be the garden before putting the soil back.   I've thrown out 10 full sized garbage cans of clay and sod.  The city workers who haul away yard waste probably don't like me much right now.

Yesterday I finished adding the edging and amending the soil with organics, so it was finally time to start planting.

Something was niggling at the back of my mind, so I double checked my real property report this morning.  That's when I remembered that the back 7 feet of my yard is technically a utility right of way.  I'm not allowed to build anything perminant there, except for the fence, and I'm not allowed to plant any trees.  So, now my job will to be go out and find some tall shrubs... maybe a columnar juniper if I can find one.

In the meantime, the front yard has been quietly blooming.  The poppies and the peony tree are putting on a show, which I've been so busy that I almost missed it.  That would have been a shame.