Unbelievable...

 Thirteen years ago we built our dream log cabin in the woods.  Our first spring my husband indulged my love of gardening and we put a flower bed along the front porch.  We were naive to the ways of clay soil and the bed slowly shifted into the porch supports.  This was not good to the structure of the cabin, so the bed had to be removed.  My husband still indulged my love of gardening and we replace the old flower bed with one that is solid and anchored down.   To the left, we are jacking up the porch and resetting the supports.  Below shows everything removed. The new bed is taking shape.  It took a long time to get everything leveled and pull up the sod.


If you look closely you can see the original four posts and how far the back ones moved.  They are almost under the porch.  You can also see that my husband enlarged the bed for my gardening pleasure.

 Ok, this is the unbelievable part of the story.  About 6 years ago, my husband and I were burning piles in the early spring.  We burned 4 or 5 piles.  While we were working on this project, I lost the hair trinket to the right.  I looked and looked for it the next day.  Every spring I would rummage around the piles looking for it.  My husband knew nothing about the loss.  Yesterday he went down to a spot at the end of our twenty acre property, where he thought he could find some good soil to fill our new flower bed.  He scooped it up with the tractor and dumped it into the driveway.  We scooped it in the the wheelbarrow and slowly filled the flower bed until it was quite dark.  This morning I was scraping up the last of the dirt when lo and behold!  There was the hair catch.  In perfect condition.   I am amazed.

 Here is the new solid bed ready to be filled with my every whim.  As you can see below it didn't take long for me to get my poor displaced flowers into their new home.  

 I am pleased with the final result.  My old bed was falling apart, ground hornets constantly built nests in it, the mice had holes throughout it, and it was filled with slugs.  I de-slugged the plants.  The bed is not covered by the porch roof, so now it will get watered naturally with the rain.  It has a nice ledge to sit on when I'm pulling weeds or picking slugs.  

In the cabin kitchen things are doing great.  The beekeeper swung by with 8 quarts of honey.  My bees may have been mean, but they made up for it in productivity.  Last year I didn't get any tomatoes and this year I have bags of them frozen.  One of these cold weekends I will can several batches of tomato soup.  I ended the weekend with an experiment.   Cucumber Jelly.  It is excellent.  Puree cucumbers, 4 T. vinegar, 4 T. lemon juice.  Strain.  Use 2 1/2 c. of cucumber juice, 6 cups of sugar, and 1 pouch of Certo liquid pectin.  I didn't keep track of how long I boiled it.  It made 6 pints of jelly.  It tastes great on crackers with cream cheese.

As always my weekend was busy.  What big projects did you do?  Any experimental projects?  Do you have a lost and found story?  I always enjoy your comments and answers to my questions.  

To answer a few of yours.  I put the sweetgrass in window sills and in my jeep.  I keep one in my office as it soothes unruly students.  I have one on the window sill next to our bed and it helps me sleep.  They last about a year or two.  My mom got me one for Christmas long ago and I loved it so much that I bought a few plugs, my sister gave me one, and planted them near our pond.  They love moisture.  This year was very wet and it grew like crazy.