February 12, 2007 - On the bus ride into work, I read a hand out about strawberries that the folks at Sego given me and realized that I had planted them too close together and not separated the roots enough. I couldn't do anything about it in the evening since it was dark when I got home. I did however finish creating the evite for the Spring Planting Party and send it out to the email address I had at hand.

February 11, 2007 - Found the centers of the circle from the plan adjusted the layout to match. Continued working on the north side run. Finished the ten foot strip goal I had set for myself the previous week. I told Katrina that we are going to plant guavas along the north side. We had shared a guava smoothie at a nearby bakery so she's been telling people that we're planting smoothies. Towards the end of the day I went to Sego Nursery to plan plant purchases for the planting party. I learned that if I want to plant fruit trees, raspberries or strawberries I do do it very soon (before the party). The fruit trees would have been a bit too much of an impluse buy and I'm not ready to plant them now so I think I'm going to wait on those until next year. I'd also like to get a fence in before I do raspberries and the folks at Sego also mentioned the possibility of mulberries trained to grow as shrubs. However, I have promised Katrina strawberries so I went ahead and bought a six pack of Sequoia and a five gallon pot of Sea Breeze. They had just planted the Sea Breeze so they were easy to split up into individual plants. I also bought 4 big bags of organic compost to mix into the soil for the strawberries.

February 3, 2007 - Created a more precise drawing of my planned layout. I had already staked out the five foot central circle and the general flow of path. I knew I wanted rounded corners leading into central circle, but it wasn't until I was creating the more precise drawing that I discovered that the north west and south west five foot circles fit perfectly into the design. Started working from the north east corner. Decided to do a six and a half foot rectangular strip. My goal for the day was ten foot strip. I ended up doing about half when my new shovel broken - not the handle, the actual metal part. I took it back to the hardware store and got a sturdier one. However, by then it was time to do family stuff so I didn't get any further.

January 27, 2007 - In the morning I did some garden working including pruning the apple tree we have in the backyard. When I got up front, I looked and the lawn and decided that I should really get to work on digging up the sod. The first little strip I did the same way I had dug up sod previously. In particular, I used a regular garden shovel to dig some up and then shook out as much dirt as I could. I realized that this was going to take a long time. I had read something about using a sod cutter somewhere on the web. I think it was in an article about LA Edible Estates garden. I figured it would be reasonable to rent something like that given how much sod I had to take up. The Food not Lawns books wasn't particularly helpful in this regard. It has a lot about the why to removing lawns, but not a lot about the how. So I started looking up stuff about sod cutters on the web. I found an interesting article on the HGTV website that discussed various approached for lawn removal. The author discussed and dismissed killing the lawn chemically (which I wouldn't have done anyway), sod cutters and a manual method using a sharpened square ended shovel. His conclusion was that while the sod cutter was faster, it was much less pleasant and much more stressful, so for moderate sized jobs like mine the square ended shovel technique was best. The idea behind this technique is to cut the general outline first, then cut under the sod and remove it in strips. It ends up removing more soil than the technique I was using, but it is much more efficient. I also discovered that if you roll the strips you can get a fair amount of the dirt off and still get the speed advantages and the neat strips for transport to the compost heap.

After I got back from the hardware store, I realized that I should really stake out the entire layout. I didn't have any extra stakes lying around in the garage and I didn't want to go back to the hardware store. I then realized that the sticks from the apple pruning could be cut up into very serviceable stakes. This worked great along with some string and twine I found around the house. It was nice to avoid an extra car trip and to use something that had grown on the property.