Reclaiming more territory from the....ah, weeds.

This is outside of our back gate. We have a path on the right with stones and over the last 30 or so years this has been the ritual dumping ground of all things no one wanted, such as tires, extra gravel, wood chips, wood, and most anything else you can imagine. I cleared the scrap out, but the digging was yet to be done. My end goal is to level it and make it a nice rose garden. The wind usually blows left to right, so it will waft in the scent of about 30 roses. A nice way to come home after a days work!

Tabula Rasa or "the blank slate"

To get down and dirty, I used the tractor to dig most of it up. It may be hard to see, but there is a slope toward us, so I tried the best I could to make it flat (poor tractoring (I'm pretty sure I just made that word up, so I'll send it off to Roget to put in next years dictionary) skills made this much harder than it had to be). I plan on getting someone who knows what they are doing to pore a concrete path and put bricks on the side where it slopes. This is next year or 2 though, so back to the mission at hand.
Once it was relatively level, I like what I was seeing. There was lots of black dirt and a few patches of gravel. Usually when you dig around here, it all looks red with clay. However, this just goes to show, distrust too much luck at the beginning because it won't last.
The first shovel hit something hard. The pick axe loosed about two inches of rocks. Then everything went red. No, I wasn't mad, it was clay. Lots and lots of it. I usually dig a hole about twice the size of the rose, but after this, I went for about 3 times or until I got tired. After hitting the upper mantle, then the lower mantle of the earths crust (There were what could have been dinosaur bones) I decided it was good enough. That old song, "deep and wide, there's a fountain flowing deep and wide" was going through my mind. The rest was easy. Just plop in some soil amender, which every good gardener is never without; some new black gold dirt, and a rose. I also put in some time release fertilizer for good measure. These plants don't know the blood, sweat, and tears that went into their nice new home, but I'm sure they'll thank me someday with some flowers!

How deep does that rabbit hole go?

The final product!