Hooray for help! My sister is coming over tomorrow to help me disassemble more of the wood frames and get the boards loaded in the dumpster, and will be back Saturday for more. This weekend, my brother will also be up, to help with getting up the crap we gathered from when we put up the first run of a fence up between us and Redneck Neighbor, including digging out some mystery equipment that’s half buried back there – it looks like a piece of an engine, to be honest, but really, since people used the back of the property as a general dump, it could be anything. It’s like a treasure hunt, except it’s all crap and not worth anything. When my other brother was here a few years ago, he and I filled two dumpsters with junk we collected from the back end of the property. You name it, it was there: car doors, bikes, used baby diapers, broken dishes. We found the bottom spring frame for a bed back there, but it was buried so deeply, and in such an odd location, that we weren’t able to get it out. Looking at what I’ve done by myself thus far, we may need the dumpster folks to haul this one off and drop another for us: you never really realize just how much space you’ve devoted to gardening in raised frames ad how much original material there is until you start tearing them down to rebuild them with better material.

Once all the wood frames are removed – and I have to say that I’m looking forward to the first instance of a Florida wood roach crawling out as we’re pulling frames and hearing my sister scream like a girl – the metal frames will go up in their place. Then: time to top them all off with a mixture of topsoil and cow shit from the two mountains that we had dumped by the rear garden. Alas, I think we probably won’t reach the start of that point by the end of the weekend, given everything else, but I have two months before the season really starts here, and I, with or without help, should be able to top everything and get my irrigation lines relaid before it’s time to transplant.