Red Riding Hood Bento

This lunch has Red Riding Hood and a mushroom and butterfly, no theme, no reason. Just that the school year is winding down, and I'm realizing I am not using up my handmade bento picks fast enough.

Lovely Wheelbarrow

This is the wheelbarrow's inaugural project. This side of the driveway has filled me with despair since we moved in. Rocks wedged down into the dirt when the car drives over them, boiling hot in the summer, ugly and depressing. I won't douse the whole thing with Roundup, so weeds take hold between the rocks that are almost impossible to pull. But there is no budget for a landscaper or a a work crew, so what could we do?

We spent Saturday and Sunday digging out all the rocks by hand. They went a foot deep in some places, and were imbedded deep in the clay soil. We hacked away with spades and rakes and scooped with our hands, filled the wheelbarrow and dumped it, over and over again. D blanched when I suggested it, but he worked alongside me all weekend. He was the wheelbarrow man too, so he can hardly stand up tonight. And now this is what it looks like.

I can't express how wonderful it feels to have a stretch of rock-free soil there. We turned over the dirt and worked in bags of compost and manure and peat, until it's soft, fluffy loam for planting. I don't really like the rocks going up to the house either, but they have some surviving plantings from a previous owner, and they're not terrible. That project can wait.

I used to think about this at night before I fell asleep. The rocks all gone and a soft bed for rosebushes, or whatever we want to put there.

I raked out this bed today too, and put fresh mulch. I planted some perennials there last year, and it looks like they came back. A good raking and lawn aeration and mowing and weedeatering the edges, and the front yard should look so much better than when we moved in.