Thursday morning my helper friend was here, and good thing too! I had a bad night with the power out as my sleep machine didn’t work. First thing we did was get more wood and go up and fix the minor damage to the hay stack.
Then we went to lay out the rows for garlic and shallots in the Small garden. Somebody miscalculated where last year’s garlic was and put the mulch down in the wrong place. So we had to move it all out of the way.
We finally got the rows laid out, the materials gathered, found more large garlic cloves (because somebody sold what she thought was “extra” bulbs of first quality), and my helper friend set to planting.
He quickly discovered another bad side effect of black plastic: the soil was badly compacted. After bending the bulb planter badly, then repairing it, he went and got the broadfork and forked along each row. Things went much faster and easier once this was done.
In the meantime, I was in the Big garden finishing the mulching of the garlic there.
We finished the garlic planting and went in to select the biggest of the shallots and got them planted. We had about ½ hour left. I was too tired and my knee really bothering, so we quit. He will be here Friday and we will finish it up then.
Once the mulching is done, I will drag out the tarps sometime over the weekend and put them down to catch the acorns, branches and leaves. There’s a considerable amount of this in the mulch already from Thursday night’s storm. I’ll have to try to clean it out…
The recycling company came and got the dumpster out of the driveway. Then they returned with a new lawn ornament. I sure hope it out of here by the time snow flies…