After leaving work Saturday, I stopped by the Community Gardens to check out my plot.  We've had no rain for over a week, and several very hot days - I needed to water my seeds and see if anything had sprouted.  

Sure enough, peas and beans were up, as were some of the greens, but the beans were not looking good - they were riddled with holes!  The ground was hard as a rock, too.  Still, I grabbed the hose and dragged it as close to the plot as it would reach, and gave everything a good drink.

The rest of the plot, I think, is going to be chalked up as a lost cause.  Too many weeds to tackle this late in the season. 

I went back to water again yesterday after work, and the sunflowers were well up, too.  Lisa, the farm educator, was there to answer any questions if gardeners showed up, and she told me the culprit eating my beans was the cucumber beetle (I guess it isn't too picky what it eats).  She plucked one off a bean leaf and squashed it.  Still, she's pretty confident that the beans will continue to grow and produce, so we shall see. I've brought in my bottle of "Garlic Barrier" and will mix up a batch to spray the leaves.  Meanwhile, I gave everything another drink and headed home. 

As I contemplated my own garden at home this weekend, I made a decision:  there was just no way I was going to be able to broadfork a whole garden this year.  If I wanted to grow enough veg for the winter, I was going to have to take drastic measures.  So, on Monday I purchased 10 yards of topsoil from a stone business in town.

Additional purchases to make the garden happen that day were landscaping cloth to lay out on the paths (I usually say "no" to this product, but sometimes we give in to the easy route), and some marsh hay and straw to use as mulch.

On Monday the weather wasn't as dreadful as it was yesterday or today, but it was still plenty hot.  After mulching the onions and spuds (got the rest of the spuds in Sunday night, as well as a few carrots), I scraped out a garden plan on the concrete-like "soil" and started laying out the cloth in the pathways. 

Then, one wheelbarrow load at a time, I started to haul soil.  As each bed was completed, I planted it with beans, peas, greens, sunflowers, cucumbers and calendulas, and topped it with a layer of marsh hay.  Everything got a good watering, which didn't work out quite as planned, for despite the protective layer of hay, soil washed away onto the landscape cloth.  

 By about 9:30 PM I had reached my limit for the day.  I'd made a good dent in the 10 yards of soil (will there be enough for all ten beds?), and I had used most of the landscape cloth.

Now I just have to wait for the weather to break before I can do any more work (I simply refuse to toil in 95 degree heat and high humidity).  In the meantime, I need to get some more landscape staples to anchor the cloth, sort through the seeds and figure out which veg I need to get in still.  And then we need to look at a fence - deer, woodchucks and rabbits are quite prolific here, not to mention raccoons, which shouldn't be a problem unless I plant corn.  I may have to rethink that one.