Brita always starts a garden by improving the soil. For her birthday, my nephew Dave and I brought her 7 pickup trucks of manure from the local horse farm. She was thrilled!

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Hauled it to the back corner of the garden, one wheelbarrow at a time. You can tell by the bright red winterberry bushes with no leaves that it was Christmas time. Cold out, but manure is warm and hauling it is heavy work.

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Brita mixes the manure with leaves that she collects from neighbors. Pure manure is too acidic for the plants. Can get about 10 large bags of leaves into the hatchback of her car. Some years, we collect as many as 60-70 bags. She's learned the best houses to go to. Those with attractive tan oak leaves, shredded by a lawn mower as they collect them. She rakes up our uglier maple leaves first and dumps them in our compost heap.

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Back to the truck for another wheelbarrow full. You can see that we have some oak trees now too. We collect acorns on occasional 4-mile walks around the neighborhood. Scatter them around the garden. Also lots of acorns in the bags of leaves we collect. Those that find the best spots grow the best, and Brita lays out woodchip paths among them as the forest begins to grow.

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Loading up again. It took a fews days to bring and distribute 7 trucks of manure.