More fun and games in the yard

Naturally Miz Becky and I decided that we hadn't had quite enough after last week's yard work -- and then there was my goal of making Sean more jealous -- so we were back at it yesterday.

Miz Becky ordered some materials from Sky Nursery to be delivered: six yards of bark dust and seven yards of top soil, which manifested themselves Friday morning as enormous piles of potential labor:

The first tasks Saturday morning were to pick up the rental truck and the tiller. As we headed off towards Hertz after collecting the pickup truck, I flicked on the radio. We were suprised to discover that it was set to one of our local NPR affiliates.

A few moments later, the answer came to both of us. "Liberals rent pickups," I said, and Miz Becky finished the thought: "conservatives own them."

After picking up the enormous hydraulic tiller -- "are you sure this is the one you meant to rent us???" -- the next task was to finish shaping the beds and to remove the last bits of sod. Naturally, we didn't have the sod cutter this week, which meant using the edger (easy) and the sod hoe (slow, painful, and and thirsty work).

After that exercise was done, we took the sod to Pacific Topsoil, where they'll... well, we don't really know what they do with it. We assume they compost it somehow. But they sure get a lot of it:

After lunch, it was on to the tilling, the spreading of topsoil, and more tilling. Miz Becky, naturally, took a turn at the tiller:

It was quite a machine. One of our neighbors was at Hertz when we were there, renting a tiny front-tine tiller, and making big eyes at the behemoth we were loading into the pickup.

We made many circuits with the tiller (discovering a buried piece of steel rebar on one of them), and many trips back and forth with the wheelbarrow. We're finally nearly done. We have about three more yards of topsoil to spread, and then there's the bark dust to put in after Miz Becky plants the beds, but things are looking pretty good now.

We're not sure what we're going to end up putting in the middle bed -- Miz Becky is planning to plant it in the fall -- but she came up with a clever idea for what's going to be there over the summer. What is it? Well, you'll just have to wait and see, won't you.

(you see how I masterfully create ze dramatic tension? Oh, mais oui, I have ze mad skillz.)