Turning this Bare Land into a Garden

All right, this is what we've been kind of getting accomplished lately. We've had about three trailer loads of this topsoil and it's just unscreened topsoil. It's just really cheap stuff. We're just using it to kind of fill in and level off the garden area. We've got another load in the trailer we need to get unloaded. We want to pick up one more today and then we also are going to try to pick up one round bale of straw and going to try to get that spread in this area. We've been getting a lot of on and off rain so we finally got a clear day today and we have a few more projects to do before we get started on unloading this dirt. So first we're going to check on the chicks. So they have only had to have this heat lamp on at the night and we have left it on a few of the colder rainy days but we've been finding that opening up this window cover and letting them get that sunlight has been really good for them. I just wanted to give you guys an update on how they are doing. You can probably see they look like they're doing really well and they are. We did about a week and a half ago lose just one chick and it was kind of to unknown causes. We think it had something to do with her breathing or choking but we couldn't really diagnose exactly what happened to her. The rest of them are doing fine and flying around. There's one right now on Eric. They can jump pretty high already. So we're just giving them a little treat. It's keeper and cinnamon. Now we have to go take out the queen cages out of the beehives. So if you remember from our bee video we had one hive that was a little more lethargic. We did contact the gentleman we got them from and he went ahead and gave us more bees to add to this hive. So this hive is doing very well. They're covering seven frames. I know the queen was active and that she's out. I cannot find her so I am going to put all the frames back and just check back on this in a few days and see if we can find her and see what other activity is going on in here. All right so we just found the queen on one of our hives. She has a longer abdomen and is a little darker. She's moving around so I'm gonna put her back but we found one queen which is really exciting. So unfortunately we did have several dead bees in that first hive or dying bees and I'm gonna feed them to the chickens. It's okay to feed them to them once they're dead. They're obviously not going to make a comeback so at least they're going somewhere. Eric and I have spent the last week bringing in unscreened soil to level this area off as well as raking it to get it pretty much as level as we could and we did off to till the area first. We don't have weeds and as much as I want to do no-till compost only type of gardening we did till this first time around because the ground is pretty solid and we needed to get it broken up for better drainage. So the style of gardening we're going to be kind of mimicking is lasagna gardening which is where you basically layer a whole bunch of organic material browns and greens on top of each other that will break down over time and give you a really healthy soil to grow crops in. So some of the things we're going to be using for this method is straw. We also have timothy hay which is a mix between grass hay and alfalfa. We have some partially seasoned horse manure, sheep manure, and goat manure and I believe there's actually steer in there as well. We have spent barley that came from a local brewery. That's a great source of nitrogen. I've also got some aged horse manure so that stuff's great. It's ready to garden in. Really rich and because we're in Alaska it doesn't look any more special but we do have some reindeer manure that we picked up at a reindeer farm. So we're primarily going to be using aged compost or manure that is not going to be hot. Chicken manure and horse manure is sometimes too hot to use for gardening but most of this is already broken down and has been broken down for several years so it should be great for this year's garden. All of this behind me we were able to pick up for free which is super awesome. We are going to be purchasing some soil with a mixed fertilizer in it and just some top soil to be adding to all that organic matter. So the reason again we are doing this is because our soil here is pretty sandy and I don't think it's very high in organic matter at all so we need to bring in all that organic matter and give it time to break down. It's definitely not magic. It's not going to happen overnight but by next year I'm betting we'll have a bunch of worms and things will be growing great. So we still need to bring in a lot more top soil and more manure. We're going to be working on that for the next few days but at the same time we're going to start working on the layout for the garden itself. This area right here is going to be rows. We are most likely going to have three foot rows and space to fit in between for walking through. At the end of the garden we have this raised bed. This is where we're going to have some food crops but also going to serve as a privacy barrier from the road. So tonight we are going to work on making this bed as well as putting in string to make those rows and then once we get the rest of the soil we're going to be using a wheelbarrow most likely to get those rows mounted up. So we are getting closer to being able to start planting some plants. We still have a lot ahead of us but we've already done a lot. We've made almost all the rows we're going to have. We've got the greenhouse started and we filled up the asparagus bed on the south side and we have this bed almost completed. So again what we've been doing is layers. We have brown then we'll do a green layer and then we'll do brown and just kind of keep going until we get to the top soil where we're going to be planting. Altogether we brought in about 60 yards including the pit fill, the compost, the manure and 12 of it was brought in by a dump truck. So the rest of it was by hand which is pretty excruciating and I think I ruined my rake with the pit fill. We're kind of pushing to get this done really fast because our plants are more than ready to be planted. We've had some perennials that were shipped to us like two months back and the quicker it gets in the ground the quicker we can eat some of that food. Is it ready to eat?