Gardening for Beginners

I may have mentioned that I really have no credentials to be a health volunteer.  Being outdoors and working with my hands always appeals to me though and so I've often thought that maybe I should have ended up an agro-forestry/environment volunteer.  They hang outside with farmers and live in the woods and work the fields which all sounds kinda cool to me.

Turns out that I probably am not cut out for that either.  Erin, the agro near me, told me to start a compost in my yard.  And I did:

Hooray, giant hole to not tell the landlord about!

Dig hole.  Easy enough.  I know, vaguely, what to put in there.  Organic stuff.  Not meat.  She was kind enough to mention that occasionally throwing sand on it stops the smell.  Since I'm dumb and did it directly under my bedroom window, I do this pretty regularly.  Oh and pee in it.  For the... nitrogen maybe?  Beats me.

Anyway, the hole filled up fairly quickly.  So I needed a new one.  Only I liked that one.  So I moved the dirt to where I imagine I might try to grow a garden (probably just entirely of basil, cause I love pesto and it is hard to find).  Well I dug a hole to put the dirt in.  But then I had the dirt from the hole I just dug.  So I dug another hole.  You might see where this is going, but I basically plowed the entirety of my backyard.

Neighbors came.  They stared.  I was utterly incapable of explaining myself.  This time it wasn't linguistic; I couldn't have in English either.

This doesn't even do it justice.

My whole yard looks like the above now.  It used to be sand.  I found the dirt.  It's deep under the sand.  I don't know why I went looking for it, but I just couldn't stop.

Maybe this will be beginning of my own personal basil farm.  Someone throw some seeds in a box.