So how was your weekend? Mine was crappy–as in filled with manure.

We’d made some progress on the turnaround so far this spring, picking up the rocks and rubble and flattening out the piles of dirt. However, I wasn’t very confident in the quality of that dirt, so before I started to plant anything, I wanted to give it a boost of nutrition. Like any decent farm, ours came with that barnyard fixture, the manure pile, so we have lots of natural fertilizer.

The turnaround is the size of some people’s backyards, so a decent quantity of manure was required. Likewise, there’s a decent distance between the pile out behind the barn and the turnaround at the front of the house.

My Dad left his trailer here a few weeks ago, and with the help of Wiley and his front end loader–my skills are much improved over last year–I brought three full loads of manure up to the garden.

The manure isn’t smelly anymore, but the lesson of the weekend is that it can be a bit slippery. I had a couple of close calls standing in the trailer shoveling it off.

This probably wasn’t quite what my Dad had in mind for his trailer when he left it with us, but he’s a good sport. So good in fact that he brought his rototiller up to the farm and went back and forth over the turnaround mixing the manure into the soil. My Mom pitched in too spreading the soil around the edges and picking out the rocks–lots and lots of rocks.

Thanks to my parents, our tractor, the trailer and our convenient manure pile, the turnaround is now ready for planting, so I guess my weekend wasn’t that crappy after all. Pretty productive, in fact.

How was your weekend?