Starting the garden

Two weekends ago I woke up early on Saturday and went with my neighbors Tom and Nina to my other neighbor's house to shovel up some free animal poop for the garden. My other neighbors have a small farm which is totally concealed from the road, I had no idea it was there.

Here I fed the pigs some cracked corn so they'd hang out with me instead of trying to kick my butt. Notice my sexy friend in the back, he was trying to get sexy with everyone.
I like this little guy, reminds me of the little pig I had for a while, his name was Bacon.
This horse is about 30 years old! I had no idea they lived that long.
She looks so sad in this picture. It's ok horse, we all get old some day.
This guy was a total ass.

This goat has devil eyes.
Here he is again, this time getting sexy with the chickens. I love the look on the brown one's face.
With the buckets full of poop I shoveled I returned home to start getting the garden ready. My gnome friend kept the garden safe all winter. I rented a tiller and started plowing the field.
But I took constant breaks to take picture of the flowers starting to bloom around the house. Here are some tulips.
Close up of the interior of a different tulip, this one was all red, not sunburst style like the ones above.
Our mower is currently broken so I haven't been able to mow the grass yet. This has allowed some plants I didn't know existed in our yard to grow and blossom, like there guys. We've also been finding random tulips around the house popping up here and there in the middle of the lawn.
Here is some rhododendron flowering. At least I think it's rhododendron.

Here are all the empty poop buckets after I mixed them into the soil.
A quick shot of the bad ass tiller I rented.
And me trying to look bad ass. Didn't work. But I hope my kids look at this one day and laugh their asses off. Hey kids of the future, you're welcome.

Now, onto the continuing saga of the car shitting robin. Here is a picture of the beautiful nest it built after I gave it a shelf as a good foundation. She flew off (probably to crap on my car) so I snuck in to take a picture of the nest.Pretty cool. And guess what.....

Booya! She must have been ready to pop because she finished the nest the day before this picture was taken. So cute and pretty. Now I get why that color is called robin's egg blue. Duh.It was a long day but the garden was fully tilled and so was my attempt at raised beds. Next year I'll actually build some beds using wood. Right now the whole garden is not on level ground and during a heavy rain it can flood towards the bottom. It's hard to see but there is an apple tree in the middle of the garden. I planted it before I knew I was going to build the garden, one day it'll be the garden or the tree that has to go but for now she's safe from the hungry deer within the sanctity of her loving fence. If you're wondering why I have a row of rocks across the garden it's marking off the septic pipe from the house to the septic system off in the distance. I found out it was there when I hit it with the tiller last year and had to fix it. That sucked!

Since these were taken I built a trellis of sorts for the cucumber and bean plants to grow up. Also two types of lettuce are in as well as spinach and some red cabbage. Also some onions and potatoes. I have a bunch of my seedlings out on the porch hardening up and they will likely go into the ground this weekend.