And it came with a free pair of gloves too

I decided to go for it and put the best soil I could afford in my new cedar boxes. After dragging my feet (and credit card), I chose Nature's Best Planting Soil. According to the website, it's composed of:

"Aged sawdust & bark, compost, potash, silica sand, loam and sand blended with a custom organic fertilizer mix consisting of kelp meal, fish bone meal, blood meal, alfalfa meal, micro and macro nutrients, scrambled eggs, hash browns, side of toast, and bat guano. We have also added Plant Success Mycorrhizal fungi for root development."

It sounds like the soil has been spending its mornings at IHOP!

Twenty minutes after ordering 4 cubic feet of Nature's Best, a dump truck showed up in front of our house and the driver asked me where to put it. He barely squeezed under the Redwood and dropped it off at the end of the driveway. It didn't look like much soil until we got to work.



We ended up having plenty of soil for three of the four 4' x 10' boxes and a lot of soil leftover for the regular existing garden (where the garlic, onions, and potatoes are/will be growing), a flower box by the front door and possibly even a thin layer over the flower bed.

This fall when we get ready to transplant the strawberries into their box, I'll get more soil. We decided to wait until late fall to do that since the strawberry plants are getting ready to produce berries and I don't want to disturb them. We're really looking forward to the berries and the fact that the plants are Ever-bearing, which means they produce several harvests of fruit a year. Can you imagine how awesome it'll be for us to walk out to our backyard and pick a couple of warm strawberries for our breakfast? Yum!



With four of us working on it, we were surprised that it still took us two hours to transfer it to the garden beds. I forgot to take photos until the very end, which is right about when Aimee realized she was 20 minutes late for yet another date.

I'm looking forward to planting seeds and plants tomorrow and this weekend. For now, I'm just hoping it doesn't freeze tonight, since I foolishly watered the strawberries this evening. They've had a hard time lately so I wanted to give them a little pick-me-up. Hopefully that won't be in the form of frosty leaves!