A Gardener Soul | Getting the terrain ready for a Chicken Pen

They say that when you turn 35 you have a tough choice to make: To either become a garden dude or just call the guy to get it done for you.

I decided to become a garden dude myself. It helps me stay active, gives me an extra sense of fulfillment, and I get to learn simple but new skills.

Now that my Quail Habitat is finished I can focus on fixing the garden and the area that I want to set my Chicken Pen in.

This is how my backyard looks. It's ok, but it could look better, especially because the dirt corridor next to the long wall is pretty uneven and about 20cm deeper than the grass part. That's where I want my chickens to roam freely and for that, I need to get to work.

So, the first step is to get a cubic meter of dirt. As much as I'd love to do it myself, I can't get that anywhere by myself so I had to call a guy. It turns out they made a mistake and I got two cubic meters for the price of one. That means more dirt for me to use but also more work which is not something I love because that means more time spent, which means more time wasted that I could be using for making money or spending time with my family, but it is also a chance to improve the garden as best as I can.

I had to ask my neighbor for his shovel because mine is small and without the curved edges that help you move dirt from one place to another, but I was pretty excited to get to work so I didn't mind asking for favors. In the picture below you will notice the tree on the left is no longer there. I had it cut down because it was only taking space, not giving any fruits and it appeared to be dead for years. I also took this chance to clean the tree on the right a little bit because it took a lot of visual space from that area.

In the picture below you can see how much visual space the tree in the corner took, and the low branches of the tree in the right used to take, now compare that to the picture above. Pay no attention to the tall grass, since that picture was taken during the rainy season I've been taking well care of my garden as you will see in the other pictures of this post.

Anyway, let's get to work.

The first thing I wanted to get done was the narrow corridor, that's what I got the dirt for and after I solve that part I can see how much dirt I have left and how I want to use it:

It looks great, and the Quails took this chance to ask for their ground to get even and balanced, which I has to oblige because I am their servant. In the meantime, I thought the mountain I had in my backyard would be almost gone by now, but oh man was I wrong.

By this point the little mountain was at half its initial power level, but I am also finished with the ditch corridor and all the holes and uneven spots in the garden. It is going to be a tough decision to make, but I have to improve spots of my garden I wasn't planning on improving and that I don't even know needs improvement. So I asked around and understood that my garden still lacks a lot of improvement.

In these two pictures from a previous post you can see the two red and pink Bougainvillea bushes that take a lot of space because I haven't taken care of them in ages. That had to be solved.

So I got my garden scissors and I got to work, they look great, but the ground beneath them is full of cut grass, some unhealthy dirt and most importantly, after doing some digging I found out the previous tenant used to bury trash and covered it. What the hell... so first I had to dig everything from there.

And then I used a lot of my new, healthy dirt to cover that space.

Now it looks kind of OK. I still have to get rid of the stuff on the left, but since this is a rented house I don't want to put too much money into the house. On the other hand, that looks awful but it was a very mexican way of fixing the water pump and having a small water system for the house, so I can't really do much other than beautify what I can and try to ignore what I can't.

I made a huge mess because I am a rookie gardener, and of course my dogs were with me during the whole process. Of course, Begona the boxer just had to take the chance and lie on the dirt instead of the clean grass pretty much everywhere else. Ignore how I left my snickers on the right for them to dry after washing them.

After that, a much more dull task came at hand. I knew that my entrance never grew any grass no matter how much I tried, so I came up with a solution. I would clean all the remaining dirt from the stones and impurities and I would use the stones to sort of pave my entrance, and I would use the pure dirt to spread it around the garden as a nutrient giver.

This one is still a work in progress because it is a hazzle to clean the dirt one bucket at a time, but I am slowly accomplishing that:

I am not finished yet, but I wanted to make this post to show you my process of evening my garden, providing an even and clean terrain for my soon-to-be chicken pen, nurturing my garden, and fixing the bush wall on the front yard.

Oh yeah, the mountain is almost gone, but there's still around 10-15% of the initial dirt that I still need to clean from stones for my entrance and the clean dirt perhaps to nurture my garden even more or maybe use it for my soon-to-be veggie setup. We'll see.