Carving out a garden

Yesterday was the first properly spring-y day we've had the whole year (except 2 really warm days in February that were just too much out of sync to count), so we decided to do some stuff in the garden. When our house was renovated, the builders pulled out every plant in the garden and made a new path to the shed, but left everything else bare. Which means that the only green thing in there were some sad patches of grass, and the pots containing the plants that we took with us from our old garden.
So off we went to the garden centre to buy some new plants. Apart from some lavender, rosemary, thyme, strawberries, and seed packages, we also came home with a neat little bird house and 120 litres of soil, which we reckoned would be enough to get us through the day.
Back home, we started to turn the soil. This was more difficult than it sounds, because after about 5 cm of earth you get into this really dense grey clay that has been sitting in a big lump for the last 500 years and doesn't really want to be anything else than a big lump. Also, there used to be a pretty big tree in the garden, and although that was cut down and removed the roots are still firmly embedded in the clay, leaving strangely yellow vines of very hard wood. That's about 50% of the garden, the other 50% is just white/yellow building sand, about as infertile as the Sahara. So after 15 minutes, the 120 litres of black soil had disappeared, mixed in to create a strangely grayish mixture.
We continued to loosen up the ground, in the process discovering the shards of what must once have been a complete window, several pens, marbles, Christmas decorations, wrappers, bottle caps, stones, bricks, solidified pieces of cement, foil, and other things you do not want in your garden if you intend on eating what you put in the ground. We now have a full trash bag of 'foreign stuff'  and are only about a quarter done. I am very curious what other things will come up.
We put in some of the new plants and some of the old plants (which one of our cats has attempted to dig up already) and went back to the garden centre, where we bought another 200 l of soil. Just to be on the safe side. I mean really, you can never have to much fertilised muck stacked up in the back of your garden.
Today appears less sunny than the weather reports would have us believe, but we still have a load of strawberry plants and other things ready to be put in, so we'll continue to carve a garden out of the clay and yellow sand for the coming weeks. We also still have to clear out and sort out the shed, which is now just filled with stuff that we didn't have room for anywhere else. And then we're going to buy a nice hard-wooden garden furniture set to replace the white plastic one that I bought for 10 euros at thrift shop when I was living in my student room.
Let's hope the summer will be long and warm enough for us to enjoy the fruits of our garden labours, edible or otherwise!