The Creation of a Backyard

I thought today would be a good time to talk about our yard since we have been trying to tackle the weeds there this week. When we moved into our house the backyard was pretty much non-existent. The previous owners had fenced a smaller area of the property to reduce the amount of yard work they had to do. Therefore, one of our first major projects was to move the fence back to enclose our entire property. This would give us a large yard and garden area, especially since we wanted to have our wedding in the backyard!

Here you can see the small "backyard" area that we started off with. The house has a decent size side yard around the corner of the house to the left, so the previous owners had some yard but not very much:

Last spring we got to work first mowing down the wild grass (i.e. weeds) and planting a few trees. Here you can see where our property ends (where the tall weeds begin). Those tall weeds are what our yard initially looked like!

Here you can see Brian working hard with his gigantic roto-tiller we rented:

And another view looking back towards the house from where our property ends. You can see the old position of the fence.

Here's a picture of the beginnings of our garden. We made frames for the beds from 1"x12" redwood boards. We dug them most of the way into the ground to help keep the plants somewhat contained. That's part of our plan to keep the raspberries in their beds :o)

And here's a picture of the yard when the garden beds were all in the ground and the grass began to grow:

Next we had to tackle the fence. We ended up using pieces from the old fence for the new fence. We put in all new posts and rails but re-used the fence boards from the old sections. We had to buy a few new boards because some of the old boards were warped or cracked but it saved us a lot of money overall. Here you can see the first few fence posts being cemented into the ground. (Don't worry, the last few posts are not cemented into place in this picture.....we made sure to level everything first!):

The most difficult part of the job was removing the old fence posts from the ground as they were held in pretty securely with cement. My dad and brothers helped us out a lot to get it done!