The yard

Here's what our yard looked like last June when we bought the house:


It looked pretty, but wasn't useful for much other than looking at. And breeding mosquitos. So we decided to rip most if it out.

 In the process of ripping out the plants and little fish pond, we found that the soil was full of little rocks and old broken glass.  The house was built in the 1890's, so at least one of the previous owners must not have been good at taking out the trash.

To clean up the soil, I bought a $5 turkey roasting tray at the grocery store, cut little holes into the bottom, and sifted through the most contaminated parts.  Probably not the most efficient way (took an afternoon), but at the end we had nice, glass-free soil.

After ripping out the landscaping and cleaning up the soil, we've done two major pieces of work: building a shed to keep our bikes in, and building raised garden beds.  Here's the end product (as of 2 weeks ago):

In the next few posts I'll get into more details about how we prepared our soil over the winter, and how we built the flower beds.