Gardening and yard work with Max

Before I begin, please notice and admire the fancy new look of this blog, which features a cute picture of Max taken last fall as its banner.  Here's the original source photo.

Today Greta and I finally got started on our gardening.  Max and the dogs helped us all the while.

Max helped with these lettuce transplants.  Shaky chewed his ball.

Max and mom admiring their handiwork on the transplants.

Max can now do two things at once: climb stairs and play with a trowel.

We decided to abandon an old bed of herbs we established outside our yard on city property.  The bed was getting too overrun with grass.  I transplanted any herbs I could salvage from the defunct bed into another bed inside our yard.  Greta had to point out to me which plants were weeds and which were herbs.

To honour Greta's sister Wendy, I will now provide a Wendy-style list of the stuff we transplanted today:

• oregano
• celantro
• chives
• some other herb who's name I've forgotten
• yet another herb
• rhubarb
• lettuce

Greta transplanting herbs (mostly).  In this picture you can clearly see the rhubarb and chives.

These are our raspberry bushes, now into their second year.  We are VERY excited about the amount of raspberries we expect to pick this summer.  We did absolutely no work on these bushes today -- I only include the picture because I like raspberries.

And finally, I spent some time today chipping away a little more of our retaining walls.  (See image below.)  We've undertaken a very ambitious project to replace our rotting railroad-tie walls with concrete blocks that we obtained for free off craigslist.  We were pleased at getting such great bricks for free.  But the pleasure quickly turned to anxiety when we realized exactly how much work it is to build a retaining wall.  (GULP!)

These rotting railroad ties need to be painstakingly pried up.  For rotting wood, they're extremely stubborn!