Do it yourself

BlankOr in my head, possibly ... :) We have finally moved from doing interior fixing-up to doing exterior fixing-up. My husband spent the entire weekend clearing brush and debris from our front yard, and underneath it all he discovered a whole bunch of gravel mixed in with the dirt in the front yard. (I say "dirt" advisedly -- there is NO grass at all, just dirt, gravel and dead weed roots.) It looks to us as though someone made a halfhearted attempt at some point to turn it into a no-maintenance yard (thus the gravel). We want to plant a lawn, and so we'd like to get the majority of the gravel out of there. Does anyone have an easy way to do this? We've thought of several non-easy ways, including digging up the gravel/dirt combo and filling in with topsoil, digging up the dirt and sieving it to get rid of the gravel, or covering it up with topsoil. None of these fill us with joy. Digging it up and replacing it is a fairly intensive operation, especially since someone buried chicken wire across the yard (apparently in an effort to control erosion). Sieving the dirt would also be fairly intensive. Covering it up sounds good, but the yard is already higher than the house's foundation, so we really want to go down, not up. (We already need to put in a french drain around the house.) Any thoughts appreciated! Thanks, Ann