Yard Work in Progress - Part 1

    I’m pretty excited we are having a garden and planting flowers this year, so I thought I would share some before, during, and after pictures of our yard since this is, after all, a blog about going green. ;) 
Note: We just bought and moved into our house last April. I was more worried about growing a baby at the time, so all of the landscaping was pre-existing. We are just beginning to spiff it up!

I didn't actually get a before picture of this area in front. This is AFTER I raked all of the leaves out and no, it's not that tiny pile sitting there either! It was like a clown car, but with leaves. 

This little area around the tree looks a LOT better just having my husband weed eat it!

This area is small, but it was a hot mess! There was an aloe plant (I think) underneath all of that, plus the big one in the pot it came from along with a cactus. Unfortunately, there were several other potted plants in various parts of the yard too. Who leaves potted plants outside?! Needless to say the pots (cheap plastic kind) were falling apart  and I just dumped most of them in the compost pile we started. 

This was probably the most fun out of all of the areas I worked on. It was basically just a thick blanket of weeds and leaves...And the weed eater crapped out on my husband right before he started here. Guess who ended up raking it all out? Honestly, though, I enjoyed it. It was nice being out in the yard and actually getting a work out of sorts. Oh, and believe it or not, there are rocks under there outlining where the bed is at! 

The beginning of our compost pile, which consists of a Christmas tree and leaves at this point. These are just the leaves from the front yard. You should have seen it AFTER we dumped all of the stuff from the previous picture in there! I swear it at least doubled in size.

Finally, this is where we're going to set our garden up. Yes, we are terracing it since the major downfall of our back yard is that it is on a slope. Welcome to Arkansas! ha ha