Yes, this is a big pile of rocks sitting in the middle of my front yard.

The previous owners left me very little in the way of healthy, usable plants—but they did leave me a buttload of rocks. In every color and size.

These were in the bed to the left of the door, which is what I decided to work on today. I had some new plants to put in—but first, the rocks had to move. Isn’t this what they make prisoners do in old movies? Move rocks? It felt like punishment, especially to my knees. I’m one big ache this evening.

This little lovely is acanthus mollis, or bear’s breathe. I found it at Green Mama’s, and came home to read about it. It’s an old plant. You know acanthus leaves that show up in Greek art all over the place? This plant is that. It’s supposed to be perfectly happy in complete shade, grows like a weed, and can get up to six feet tall—so, I planted it between windows rather than directly under one. It’s also invasive, so unless I wanted it to go crazy, I had to sink a pot into the ground to contain its roots. See those blue things on either side?

Those blue things in the dirt are actually the handles of this blue plastic laundry tub. It was the only reasonably prices container this large I could find, and since even the handles will shortly be under a thick layer of mulch, I figured these bright blue ones would be fine. Needless to say, it takes one big, honking hole to sink this into the ground. Luckily, with all the rain we’ve had lately, the ground was still soft and easy to dig. I have another one of these to plant, so I guess I’d better jump on that quickly, while the digging is good.