Wanted: Dirt.

So any of you who have talked to me about my garden beds might know that they arent going to be planted until August.  Originally, i thought i'd plant indoors in July and move them out to the beds in August, but i'm told thats unnecessary and might shock the plants.  So straight into the bed it is!!

What's the next step then? Dirt.  I need about 205 cubic feet of dirt to fill my beds! preferably dirt mixed with compost/manure/whatever.  I also need a pick-up to haul it with.  So today I will post my need on Craigslist, and hopefully have some dirt by the weekend.  Which is good because my mom will be here this weekend to help me haul it!

Also this weekend is the Peach Festival.  It should be a good time all around!

So have you ever thought about how much dirt that is? or how one would go about getting it? or how horrible the dirt is here in arizona?  I am pretty concerned i'm going to have to buy 100 of those little bags at home depot which will cost upwards of $400 in order to be able to fill the whole thing with the type of dirt that might actually grow something.

"What about your compost?" you might ask me. Good question.

The compost is a bit of a touchy subject around here right now.  I suppose i put too much chicken manure in it, because it started to smell like battery acid.  It stung your nose to smell it. That smell (the internet tells me) is indicitive of too much nitrogen and not enough carbon.  So in lay terms: too much poop, not enough food scraps.  This is amazing because my mother in law, who is a caterer, was giving us 3 five gallon buckets of food scraps a day for about a week there! and then on top of all of that, the compost is soaking wet.  Remember i told you before it should be like a rung out spounge? well it doesnt have that happening right now.  So basically if we put in more kitchen scraps to offset the poop it will wet down the compost even more, so we need a LOT of dry material to make up for it.  Right now we are throwing in all of our newspapers to try to even it out.  Needless to say, its not ready to be used for planting purposes yet!

 So this is last weekend's news paper shredding adventure.

In a state perpetually on fire, citizen's sue over not being allow to
 use fireworks.  Sigh.

See? people say there is no use for news paper any more!  Surely i cant dry out my compost with the internet! thanks Arizona Daily Star!








And even after all of that, this week it is still soppy.  So we put the same amount of newspaper in again yesterday.  We'll see how it goes.


So i am in the market for some dirt.  You know anyone?