16 Tons and Whaddya Get?!

...Another day older and deeper in debt?  Well maybe, but we sure are liking the results.  It is now time for the grand reveal!  We have been laboring the last three weekends on our backyard garden area, and have some great pictures of the process along the way.

Here is the before, even before we had the trees taken out:


We had three large fir trees taken down on our property at the beginning of March.  We processed probably about 4-5 cords out of it, and still most of the tree in the back yard was still in rounds.  The left over we just posted for free on Craigslist, and people came from everywhere to come and do the work to take it off of our hands.  It was insanity, we had close to 15 calls in 20 minutes of the posting.

Once the trees were out of the way, we got to work.  Materials have included 16 tons of boulders, 16 yards of dirt, 2 yards of sand, and 2 yards of 7/8 drain rock.

We leveled out the back area, moving dirt by shovel, and built a small retaining wall at the front.

Then we finally decided on a layout and measured out the beds and put down weed block.

Next step was to just bite the bullet and start hauling and setting rock.

Then came my battle wound... ouch :-(

 And there was more rock stacking...

And composter assembling...

And finally,  a layer of sand over the weed block, and a layer of 7/8 gravel...the finishing touches!!!  So here you go... a side by side of the before and after.

The last couple pieces will come along eventually, which will include a potting bench and small greenhouse against the back of the garage.

Hooray!  And one other project that I mentioned earlier also got finished.  The mantel!  I need to keep working with the decor on the mantel/bookshelves, but the construction itself turned out great, thanks to a very handy honey!