Let’s be honest – our backyard is going to take quite a while to turn into something beautiful. But today we took a big step forward!

To get things moving forward, we’ve enlisted the help of our good friend Meri Mohr, recently certified permaculture specialist. She’s totally helping us figure it out.

First step, as usual, is to clear out what’s already there. We wanted to get rid of almost all the paving stones (covering probably half the total yard space), pull up most the ‘rubble’ – random cinder blocks, bricks and pieces of concrete. Shannon was also extremely interested in removing the big clumps of bamboo along the right hand side of the yard, which have bothered her ever since we moved in.

Knowing that this winter’s rains are supposed to be pretty heavy, Meri recommended getting some ‘cover crops’ down to start improving the existing soil. So we declared a work day for today, scheduled a couple of day labor helpers, and got busy.

Here’s the yard as of Sunday morning (soon after we started). The landscaping fabric is covering a pile of dirt in what used to be a planter bed. We think there was some kind of food plant in there, but we’re not sure… 

Several hours of hard labor later, we now have over 250 (12 inch square) paving stones piled up neatly waiting for us to figure out what to do with them.  And we’ve got a yard of mostly open soil, with lots of Vetch, peas, fava beans and other crops seeded.

 

Shannon and Meri pulled up lots of weed-block fabric (and plastic bags) that had been covered in mulch and then overgrown.  To blend the tree bark mulch into the dirt so it can hopefully, eventually, decompose, and to loosen the soil for our cover crops, I got to play with a fun toy borrowed from our friend John C (who purchased it with his fixer house last year) – a gas powered roto-tiller!

 

Less flashy, but really important…

As a side project, we had one of our support guys focused on moving dirt from the smaller path along the right hand side of the house. We discovered a couple of months ago that dirt (and glass, and rocks, and gravel and trash) had been purposefully piled up along the side of the house to make a sort of ramp from street level up to the level of the backyard. Alas, this means that about a foot of soil was *above* the foundation line, which can lead to a variety of problems with moisture seeping in if left for too long. There’s no visible damage to the stucco, even below where the soil’s been resting, but we wanted to get the side of the house cleared before the ‘big rains’ come. That project’s not done yet, but we made a LOT of progress, for which I’m glad!