Improvements

I thought I'd share a few pictures of our more recent labor of love: our backyard. Like our house, it had been neglected by the owners and abused by the dogs. There were holes all over the yard and the fence and bushes were scratched and gnawed on. It's been "finished" (at least the main projects) for awhile, but I'm just now getting around to posting about it.

Here is the back garden. It has been so much fun to have my own gardens! I've been dreaming of this for a long time.

This is in March (work partially done). We moved rocks and some dead shrubs to make room for flowers. Cal also built a retaining wall next to the door so our step wasn't always muddy or dirty. We bought ourselves a patio set, that we've loved. The little kid table I found at a garage sale and the turtle sandbox we got for free from my parents' neighbors.

We moved all of the rocks from the back fence area, found the edge (overgrown with grass and weeds), put in pavers for a border, and moved in 3 tons of topsoil, compost, and mulch for the back garden. You can see the spots in the grass where we've filled the holes from the dogs and reseeded. It's gradually getting better.

We planted 2 trees (a peach and aspens). We may never see these get big, but it makes our yard feel so much nicer.

Cal built us a vegetable garden in which we planted:

lettuce, spinach, strawberries, zuchinni, tomatoes, cilantro, green onions, carrots, cucumbers, and pumpkins.

So far we've gotten a few strawberries (what the birds didn't get), tons of lettuce and spinach, and 2 tomatoes. Yum!

This is our sideyard. It had been the dog run (once the owners realized they needed to contain their dogs) and so it had been dug up and pooped in. We decided to just cover it with 3 tons of gravel (about 5-6 inches deep). Much better.

It's been a lot of work, but we love having a yard to spend time in together!