Back Breaking Work

They are not kidding when they say working the land is back breaking work – and all I’m doing is weeding. It’s not like I’m out with the horse and plough or anything. I actually finished nearly all of the weeding, enough at least to produce a huge sigh of relief, but as I have no photos of it and have a bunch of old ones to post, we’ll pretend I’m not quite done yet.

I’m at a bit of a loss as to whether I should post most recent to oldest or vice versa. I know I should have the most recent at the top, but my brain can’t tell stories that way, so let’s go oldest to most recent.

I bought the house in June 2010. Much as I loved my apartment in San Francisco, I REALLY wanted summer (the hot kind), my own 4 walls, and a big yard so I could garden. It was time to move to the e-bay, so move I did, into an awesome 1912 Craftsman Bungalow. It came with a sodded yard. Oh, and a dead cat. While I don’t mind sod in general, I do mind wasting water trying to keep something green in a climate that is supposed to be brown during the summer. Here are some photos of the before – gravel paths along the sides of the yard, planted border, stone patio in the back corner (with the dead cat) and sod as far as the eye can see.

Original yard, sod and all. Garage to the right.

original yard, facing house

You can see that by the time I took the second picture, large chunks of the sod weren’t doing so well. Strangely, some small men came and replaced the dry sod even though I owned the house?! I then promptly put an ad on Craigslist: First Come, First Take Sod. Took him 3 days to dig it all up and take it – boy was I grateful for Craigslist.

Then my parents came down to help out, my father is an excellent builder of things, so we went to work implementing the awesome design Steven Young did for my landscaping. Took quite a while to get the beds in and level (all with each other?!) but they really did come out nicely.

Bed construction - Day 1+

That’s my dad!

Beds Complete! Day 4 + Vic

I know! It looks awesome. So I went to work planting the plants we had taken out from the borders and the back corner, and I took a great picture at the end of last summer of the current state of the back yard, and deleted it at Burning Man accidentally. Sigh. You’ll note the clever folks who did the yard for the flipped house put the hot crops (tomato and eggplant) under the Wisteria in the back in the only shaded area. Needless to say I won’t be keeping that bed.

I do feel the need to point out that it took over 20 cubic yards of dirt to fill these beds. That and a wheelbarrow and a 2×10 pressure treated board as a ramp. I did maybe 15% of it (my dad did the rest) and I couldn’t move for days. He was up like a jumping bean early the next morning raring to go.

Here’s the backyard after the winter flood we had:

The weeds, they grew

and then the final devastation after the 40 days of sun followed by the second month of flooding. You can’t tell, but I am standing in the middle of the beds – I could not even see the outline of them anymore, and they’re two feet tall. I was feeling very overwhelmed when I took this picture. Thank goodness for sunny afternoons, friend (Atalanta) for hire and a concentrated session with the parents, or I would never have dug out!

weeds ate my yard. true story.

I’ll save the exciting veggie gardening stories for another day. I know, I know, you can hardly hold the excitement in. Absence makes the heart grow fonder!