a couple years ago (2022, i think) my wife and i bought a house. it is what, in the parlance, would be called a "fixer-upper" or a "nice starter home", which are both gross euphemisms for, let's be frank, shit holes. which this house was, not to sugar coat it. the carpet was disgusting indoor-outdoor that had years of dog pee baked in, the front yard was just dirt, the back yard was also dirt, there were no gutters but there were trenches dug into the yard from the rain falling off the roof, etc. it was in our price range and actually the least-bad of the options we toured, and for under $300,000.00 in 2022, we went for it. we've had to do lots of things inside to make it more or less liveable: replacing the entire large bathroom since it was filled with mold, removing the disgusting carpeting and putting down some LVT redoing the small en suite bathroom for similar mold reasons, retrenching the sewer line, adding gutters, etc etc etc. now, we have a house with a pleasant and liveable interior! after two years, it's time to look at the outside.
sometimes a yard is just more projects. here's the backyard in photos with some descriptions of what i envision doing with the space.
okay, so this is looking out our back door to the left. you can see what we've got going on here: a concrete patio slab, some recycling receptacles, a grill, an old bike, a shed, etc. that cage looking structure is a catio we (really my lovely wife) built and mounted to the top of a Habitat for Humanity old table. she's awesome.
you can see behind that the blue of a rain barrel. we got gutters put on the house early and i am slowly setting up rain barrels at each downspout. my longer term goal is to hook up some drip irrigation lines to those barrels and have them water a produce garden.
here's a better view of the cracked concrete patio. okay, as i say regularly when talking about hopes and desires, "dream with me."
imagine a pergola over the patio, with vines (beans?) growing up the posts and along the rafters. from the roof hangs a ceiling fan, and against the wall of the house is an outdoor couch of some kind. the grill is outside the pergola space, functioning as the main hob of our outdoor kitchen space. lots of plants hang in pots from hooks drilled into the pergola's beams.
okay, here's the main yard space. it is... sad. we're working on it. right now we have an old shed, a ton of mulch we laid over what was dirt, a compost heap obscured by the weed/tree thing in the back right, an outdoor table, a firepit, some pathways, etc.
dream with me. we get rid of the shed, or move it, or something. in its place we lay a slab and build up a greenhouse over it. that's right outside our bedroom, so i'd add big french doors in the bedroom opening into the greenhouse so the lovely wife could sun in it even in the winter.
the space that's mulched is going to be our primary garden space. i'm thinking due to our 7a climate zone maybe a Zunni square Three Sisters Garden. the fence will be entirely fronted with giant amaranth, and the weird little pathway i've got in place now will grow to a meandering kinhin (walking meditation) path for our local zen group. the compost heap will remain and grow and help take our cooking outputs and leftovers and turn them into soil for our garden. the table will likely migrate to under the aforedreamt pergola, and the aboveground fire pit may relocate to the front yard or something.
from our backdoor looking to the right, more of our path, my canoe, and the parts of the fence that still need to be put in.
in the dreamspace, the canoe has a real canoe holder against the fence for the offseason, and then to the right of it would be bike parking as that's the corner of the fenced area. i would likely put some kind of canopy over the bike area to help protect our various bikes from our merciless high desert sun and also the bird poop we get constantly on everything.
okay, this was supposed to be our potato patch. and it is (that's a single successful potato growing into a bush there in the center, surrounded by old fence posts as a kind of bed space), but it could be more.
given that it's essentially right outside our sliding back door, i want to keep the path in place but make the "garden" space into more kitchen and herbal essentials, while increasing the size and complexity of the path. in the space around the "bed" i envision potted plants, etc. in the center of the yard, essentially where the firepit is, we're going to plant a cottonwood tree as they are native to our area and will provide shade to the house.
so there you have it - a dream in progress. more to come.
