Steel Planter Boxes

Brent is constructing steel planter boxes for our beds! They are going to be fantastic!

Brent designed the steel with notched corners to match our craftsman feel. These steel panels will rust over and look simply awesome!

While Brent welds I sift. And sift. And sift. And sift. I am good at harvesting rocks. But when I add the compost it makes some pretty beautiful soil!

April Fools in October.

I planted a pumpkin in front. It was a beautiful plant but produced NO pumpkins. Friends and family comment frequently on our large pumpkin plant in the front garden bed of our house.  The leaves were huge, green and impressive. But it is a beautiful, fruitless pumpkin plant. FINALLY it sprouted one pumpkin the first week of September.

This dumb plant was gorgeous but a HUGE disappointment. Friends and family have been patient listening to my incessant complaining about this ridiculous plant. Early yesterday morning as we were pulling out to go to early morning seminary Sierra said The pumpkin is orange!" I insisted that was impossible since I had checked the plant the night before. We were the recipients of an awesome practical joke/gift/early April Fools...during the night someone hid six pumpkins in my plant. I laughed all day and woke up again this morning with a smile. THANK YOU to whoever did this--it's now a favorite family story!!! (I haven't laughed that hard in a long time!!!)      

Grass!!!

We have GRASS!!! This is the most exciting news since moving in! It completes our look in the most beautiful way...but boy oh boy was it work!!

Our first project was to till the dirt and remove the rocks. This pile was much more impressive in person. It was a ton (literally) of rocks.

 The rocks just kept coming...

We rolled everything flat after tilled in a truck full of compost (note the flag that the scouts put out--we work on the holidays!)

A view of our fancy sifting system

Getting closer...

Tilling in the evening

Another truck load of compost

 A beautiful sight!! One of the happiest days of the entire house building project.

 My favorite shot of the entire day. Estee was so happy to have grass. She kept saying all day long "All I want to do is lay on the grass!"

The not so fun job of loading all the rocks into the trailer. So many rocks. 

Our one snafoo was that we made the main patch too wet as we were working to "settle" the dirt. We had a sprinkler on the front section and I left it on too long. It set us back a day.