Backyard Work Begins!

Hi folks! The weather is finally getting nice here in Minneapolis, so lately we have been tackling some outdoor projects.

Originally, our back yard started out looking like this (view from the breakfast nook windows):

The ready-to-fall-apart-any-minute-deck is to the right:

The deck replacement project is in the planning stages currently. Hopefully we'll start on that in a couple weeks or so. Anyway, back to the other side of the yard:

As you can see, there are a couple circles of white rocks breaking up the lawn. One surrounded a very rotten stump and the other surrounded a bird feeder. Since we don't plan on using the bird feeder and .. well... a stump isn't much use to us either, we decided to totally remove those and integrate them with the rest of the lawn. Eric got first duty for rock removal.

Those 4 rocks in his shovel must be quite heavy... no, Eric isn't dramatic at all...

We're also planning to put a vegetable garden in the back right corner of the property (in the area you can see between the deck and tree in the previous photos). So, we figured that we could use the sod we remove from the garden to fill in the holes left from removing the rocks.

The first step was to sketch out the garden (I wish I had a scanner so I could show you my super cool overly-detailed plan). Anyway, the basic shape of the garden will be an 'L' shape, with about 14 feet on each of the long sides. After we had the dimensions all figured out, we laid out some sticks and twine to mark the boundaries.

Next came the digging and sod removal.

Hmm.... it turns out I don't really have enough mass to push the shovel down very far... so Eric took over that part and I started removing rocks from back in the corner. Pretty soon we had a good mess!

As you can see, we have a lot of work ahead of us. Hopefully we'll be planting our vegetable garden before mid-June  :)

In totally unrelated news, my neighborhood is hosting a festival of garage sales this weekend. Eric and I went to a couple of them today and we've already got some spoils - like this corner shelf we scored for just $5. My family will be vising tomorrow to do some more garage sale-ing. I love a good treasure hunt - can't wait!!