I tried to do a pallet garden last year. Like this:
Except that's not my picture. Mine was a little more sparse (flowers get expensive! Holy cow!). Anyway, I learned that the East side of my apartment is a bad idea for a garden. It got scorched. It also didn't help that I spent a week dog-sitting at my parents' house, so I didn't water them for that long. Pretty much I had flowers for about two weeks and an ugly pallet leaking dirt and dead flowers for nearly a year leaning against the building.
I had a good interview on Tuesday (my birthday!) but haven't heard back yet. So, since I'm still unemployed and it's nice outside - 50 degrees and sunny, not bad for April in Michigan - I decided to tear down the stupid ugly pallet garden. I don't know what I was thinking. I can never keep plants alive. I killed a bamboo plant. That's supposed to be nearly impossible.
I decided to dump the nice (expensive) potting soil in the ruts that some of you may remember confounded my car a couple weeks ago (LINK). So I put on my mucking boots and grabbed my gardening/barn gloves. The only shovel I have is an enormous snow shovel. I also have a bucket that used to hold salt. Knocking the dirt from the pallet wasn't hard. Neither was shoveling it with the snow shovel, but dumping the dirt from the huge-ass snow shovel into a little bucket proved difficult. I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have a few extra piles of dirt to shovel with my hands.
I dumped a few bucketfuls into the deepest rut and clomped over to the next rut. I started to dump a bucket of dirt then stopped when I spotted something. There was something metal, though very rusty. I knew I wouldn't be able to drive into the ruts for a while yet - until I can get gravel down - but I was curious. I dug it out...it was a rusty horseshoe!
My driveway is a VERY strange place to find a horseshoe. I live next to a lake and a lake town, not pastures! I had to laugh! There I was, in my mucking boots and barn clothes, pulling up a horseshoe from my driveway! Since horseshoes are supposed to be good luck, I'm keeping it. I don't know what to do with it. Right now, it's hooked around two closet door handles that won't stay shut in the mud room.
Any ideas how to clean it up? Or should I leave it in its dirty, rusty glory?