We’ve got gravel, yes we do! We’ve got gravel, how ’bout you?!

Anyone who has ventured up our driveway during the last few years will understand the hugeness of this: “We got gravel.” Four trips by the dump truck, and our driveway is no longer something we have to warn people about. At least we don’t have to warn them in all capital letters. There are still a few rough spots, but most of the canyons are filled in.

Half of the last truck load was dropped in our “parking spot” Monday afternoon. It may come as a surprise to you, but dump trucks don’t really dump all that accurately. They can do okay given enough room, but in the confines of our parking spot, the best the driver could do was get the gravel dumped out in two patches about 6-8 inches deep. It was up to us to get the extra moved from the center out to the sides. Monday is one of my work-at-home days, so at 5:00 I headed out with a shovel and a rake and tried to move stuff around. The light was fading fast, so I brought out our electric lantern and kept shifting it every few minutes. Do I need to say how hard it is to spread and level dark gravel in the dark? There was a lot of squinting and wishing for cat vision. I stopped when Andy got home, and he went out for a bit but gave up.

It rained yesterday and all day today. Now we have WET gravel to move. Whose idea was this anyway?

The worst part is we’ve had to park the truck on the hill since the parking spot is under construction. The parking brake on the truck has never really been 100% since we moved here. I worry a bit that we’ll wake up in the morning, and the truck will have rolled down the hill into the barn or the pond or the sheep.

We’re working on constructing a new garden. It’s the berry bed. My plan is to put all the (I bet you can’t guess!) berries in this one garden, and then we (i.e., Andy) can build a little cage around it with pvc pipes and netting to keep the birds out. I may also put asparagus in there because of its perennial ways.

The garden started a few months ago when we bought some ginormous locust beams from craigslist. They became the border of the garden. And that was where it stopped (except for the four foot tall weeds that kept growing). Finally, when my folks were here a couple weeks back, Andy hacked down the weeds. He and my dad drove the twisty, hilly, backroads (aka everywhere around here) and got two loads of free horse poop. YUMMMMMM!

Of course I can never get enough horse poop or compost or soil or straw or leaves, so when a person nearby advertised MORE (composted!!) horse poop, we couldn’t pass it up. Last night after picking up Anya, we went and got another truck load. To explain our detour (Anya is very big on telling us if we go the wrong way) we mentioned we were going to get horse poo. Anya thought this was really awesome and kept saying, “Poop! Poop! Poop!” What are we going to get? “POOP!” What is the tractor putting in the truck? “POOP!” What is your favorite color? “POOOOOP!”

This afternoon we went out to the berry garden to spread stuff around. “Poop!” Anya brought her kid-sized garden tools down, but mostly she sat in the poo and dug around and picked up big “rocks” to show me. My little poo baby! She had poo under her nails and in her socks and mixed with the snot running down her nose. When we came back to the house, she took off her shoes and clothes and the poo dust fell all over the floor like giant, brown dandruff. It was almost magical.