my annual solicitation for garden pity

This is a actual, unaltered photo of the soil from my back yard. Ah, poor Empress! I know, I know, it's about as bad as it gets. It is a place where no self-respecting plant will grow beyond a year or two. Worms actual look at it from afar and laugh. Some of it is so hard I can mistaken it for rocks when I dig it up (an accomplishment that can only occur directly following a heavy rain fall).

Hence my revised plan to wave the white flag, admit defeat, and plant some trees back there. Years from now, whoever lives here will thank me. Ask me how much I wish I had planted a bunch of tall trees when we moved here! Then I would be thanking me now instead of lamenting this rock-hard mass of soil known as my backyard. But you do what you can and when you know better, you do better. Or so the story goes.

Rock Carry on.