First Look (before pics)

So, here's a look at my yard before I began... Well, more accurately, before I started this year. hee hee... I had fumbled around a couple years ago with my herb garden. More on that when I get to that picture.

These are my front yard. There's some ornamental landscaping with shredded bark mulch. Hostas and a few annuals. My front yard is mostly shade all day (north side), with just a bit of dappled sun in the morning and evening.

There's a raised bed in the front. I currently have a corkscrew willow planted too close to the foundation, so it's going away, and 1 each astilbe, lungwort, & black cohosh plants. Oh... and some creeper, forgot it's name. The bed needs cleaning up bigtime.

This little bed is under a cedar tree that is planted in front, next to the driveway. It's got some sedum, a struggling hen & chick, and a few annual marigolds that are now huge bushes.









This picture is our west side yard. It's about 4 ft higher than our driveway, faced on the west with a retaining wall. There's a crabapple tree at the edge of the retaining wall. This area is rather large. One thing I need to do on this side is plant some insulating shrubs along the west side of the house, to cut the wind. There is a rain barrel on this side. It is not utilized as well as it should be, but I do use it to water the plantings in front.

This is the east side of the house. The space is very narrow and rocky. Apparently someone had mulched with pebbles, as well as dumping their fish tank pebbles out next to the front porch on this side. The rain barrel is functional... I use it to water the front when I need to. This space is maybe... 4 ft wide. Or 5 ft at most.




And to the back yard... this is on the east side, by the back porch. A very narrow bit of ground that the hubby sprayed with Roundup in the spring. Fortunately roundup breaks down quickly. I need to get some advice, but I will probably plant something there that I won't be able to harvest for a couple years, which will allow the chems to disappear before we eat whatever is planted there.

On the south side of the house there are two patches of ground. Not really sure what to do with them. One of them is really sloped. I would like to build a "sprouthouse" (my name) on one of these spots.


It would be a smaller version of a lean-to greenhouse, and mostly to sprout my garden stuff for transplanting. If I can build it well enough, I may try to use it as a cold frame and grow winter greens in it. That's a pretty ambitious plan, so we'll see if it happens. We are supposed to have a rain barrel back here as well, but I never got the ground where it should be leveled off, so it's not been installed.

This is my "herb garden". This spot had been leveled off for a pool, so it's mostly circular shaped. My plan was to outline the circle in stones for a border, and outline a 5 pointed star inside. A few years ago I put down newspaper and straw, but I didn't know what I was doing so it wasn't quite right. In this picture, it is somewhat taken over by weeds. Then later, our lawn mower person mowed over the herbs along the edge and I lost my thyme, basil, oregano and rosemary. They didn't mow over the stuff in the center... they realized it was a garden then. sigh... I also planted some late tomato plants there, as the space I had planned to use was water-logged from heavy spring rains and the veggies I had planted in that space rotted. So, the tomatoes went in with the herbs. Currently there are 3 tomato plants, sage bushes, a new lavender, chives.

As you see in the above picture, there is a "playground" for my son. That will remain. We're having problems this year with excessive mosquitoes though, and wasps. Hubby and I are both allergic to bees so we are being careful with the kid and not letting him play much around the wasps. They are nesting in our garage (along with birds grrr).

This is the other side of the back yard. Our yard gently slopes down. There's an acre of land behind our lot that slopes even more, toward a creek. There's a retaining wall that seperates this upper portion (including the herb garden) from the lower level that has the playground and garage.

This is the space behind the garage. it's as long as our 2 car garage, and about half as wide. Before I knew about permaculture, this space was going to be my traditional garden. It has been a garden before. It is weedy. At the very back I have a long-term "compost" pile. Or I should say, a pile of branches and crap I don't feel like shoving into a paper lawn bag for the city to pick up. I figure in a few years it will compost itself!

We hope to paint or side our garage soon. After that happens, I hope to hang a bat house on the back of it to help mitigate the mosquito population.

Our whole back yard is fenced. We have a driveway that is very long, and was gravel-covered, but is now overgrown with grass/weeds and requires mowing. Not sure what we'll do with the driveway... it may end up remaining "lawn" for a while, and will be the kid's greenspace to play in. it's not very plantable because of the gravel below the weeds, and we both want to use it for getting cars into/out of the garage someday. So someday we may gravel it again.

Next post will show some of the changes I've done since I took these pictures.