On The Garden Front

This year "Quackgrass Acres" has moved from the community garden to our back yard. Community gardens are wonderful things but it just didn't work out for me. Now I can walk out the back door and do a bit of gardening whenever I feel like it without getting in the car for a ride across town. So it's starting small, as a container garden on a small cement and flagstone patio area that we didn't use. The process of removing our son's dilapidated treehouse and the dead hemlocks has begun. Ultimately, that will give us a bigger space for the garden but I'm happy with this for the time being. Good soil for the containers is the big need now.
I still have my DIY Japanese wind bells (furin) from last year, much to my amazement. I foolishly left them out all winter but they came through it just fine. All I had to do was replace the tails. They were a fun project and I'm thinking of making a tutorial on how to do it. The one in the picture is made from a thrifted votive glass. I have others made from porcelain teacups. The wind has been blowing like mad here so I hooked the tails on the fence posts to stop them from ringing themselves to bits.