The backyard

I don't really have any great pictures of what our backyard looked like when we first bought our house. But, I will just say that it was full of tall weeds, trash trees along the fence line, a few diseased fruit trees, 10 foot tall roses, and a whole lot of chinese lettuce, mint, and other random herbs. Right in the middle of the yard was a huge tree right on top of the sprinkler line with roots going all across the entire yard. This would prevent us from doing any work back there at all. After cutting it down and tearing it out, we discovered the roots wrapped around the line and a sprinkler head going right up the middle of the tree and out the side! Anyway, we had to completely tear everything out and start from scratch. We were able to keep a plum and peach tree, the roses (although we had to cut them all WAY back), and some 4-o'clock flowers on the side of the house. Everything else was cut down, torn out, killed with Round-up, roto-tilled, raked free from debris and rocks, and fertilized. Whew! And that was just the clearing out part. Once everything was torn out, we had to fix the sprinkler lines, and heads, and re-route and cap different ones so that it was in a good pattern (We still need to adjust some of them to get the best coverage.). Anyway, it was more than a year's worth of work that we put in back there--mostly by ourselves, but with a little help here and there from friends (thank goodness!). We had to buy several tools and the other shrubs and fruit trees and the sod we planted back there, but we figured all the labor we did saved us a few thousand dollars. The removal of the big tree alone would have been $2,000, and the sprinklers could have easily been another $1,000. The backyard is clean and open and grassy. The side yard is tilled and ready for a garden. The fence line needs a few more shrubs to fill it in a bit more. All in all, we are so pleased with how everything turned out. Shoot, we're downright ECSTATIC that the kids will be able to go out there and play and that the house won't get so full of dust and mud anymore! Here are some pictures that will give you an idea of the last two months of work that went into this yard. For a several months during the wet season, our backyard was just a soggy, muddy mess with a giant hole in the middle filled with rain water. After everything dried out, it was rock hard dirt (still with the black hole where the tree had been), broken pipes, 10 inch deep trenches all over from digging the sprinkler lines, 2-5 inch deep trenches from pulling tree roots out that spanned the entire yard, and random weeds. Once all the sprinkler lines were fixed and all the weeds were killed off, we began tilling and leveling the dirt. This is where the pictures begin.