My Boys Rock

So we decided to grow a vegetable garden this year. I'm not sure if we will actually get anything out of it because I have a black thumb, but we thought we'd give it a shot. The only problem was that our house had no ground prepared for a vegetable garden. The boys and I spent many hours outside tearing out bushes and tilling the soil. The boys loved using the hoes and rakes although I had to constantly remind them that gardening implements are not weapons, unless you are waging war on the weeds.

The garden beds on the side of the house posed a bigger problem- they were filled with lava rocks. We don't own a wheelbarrow, and I doubt my boys could wield one anyway. So, how to move 32 cubic feet of rock? Ricks Boy Bucket Brigade of course!

I had grouped the buckets together to take a picture but Elijah said, "Wait Mom! I will make it look like something special." He then preceded to put the unsightly non-matching buckets off to the side and made a pleasing pattern of the blue and red buckets. Yeah, he's definitely an aesthete.

That's right, we shifted all those rocks by hand. We loaded the buckets by hand, hauled them to the flower beds that could use some more rocks and dumped them out until those garden beds were rock-free.

Now that's what I call getting your hands dirty.

It was extremely satisfying uncovering and tilling all that earth. I loved walking on it in my bare feet. There is something intoxicating about working with your hands, preparing a home for your little plants and then watching them grow. Maybe if I didn't have a black thumb we'd actually be getting some produce by now, but for this year I'll count it a success if anything stays alive until the first frost in the fall. Next year, maybe I'll have the Ricks Boy Bucket Brigade hauling fertilizer. My hard-working boys rock.