Our backyard: blood, sweat, tears and grass

When we moved in to our new place we were very excited because we have exclusive rights to the yard and patio in the back. However, the guy who lived there for the 5 or so years before us hadn't really touched any of it, so where there had been grass it had been overtaken by weeds.  There was a lot of garden beds, but I kill all plants I've ever owned.  This past summer I bought some cilantro and basil, I'm pretty sure they were both totally dead before the amount of time it would have taken for a bunch of cilantro from the produce section to go bad. I knew we needed to get rid of a lot of the garden area and put in something with less maintenance so we decided to put in sod.  

Before (well, actually somewhere in the middle of the process)
 

The actual sod laying was pretty easy, although we were in a super big hurry because we ended up having to do it last minute because of sod delivery issues. The true challenge though was the preparation process. It involved 4 rounds of roundup, renting tools from home depot on 3 separate occasions (we are now on first name basis with the tool man... his name is Izzy), tilling, hoeing, back pain, fertilizing, ripping up trees, finding the biggest slugs of all time and becoming extremely grossed out, pH testing (I just took a bag of our dirt to work to test it out there), a few total freak outs from last minute notifications that the sod was arriving early, and finally flattening (which we didn't do a great job of), laying sod, and lots of watering, getting our lawn mower fixed, and mowing it.  whew, It was a lot of really hard work drawn out over a couple months, but we are so happy to have it done!  We still have some work to do next spring/summer to spice it up a little bit, but we think it looks pretty good!

Our condo association is also working together on the front, we just put in this retaining wall and are going to put in grass here too:

Our next project is going to be planting a tree and some flowering shrubs.  I'm supposedly getting 10 free trees and 2 shrubs from the arbor day foundation sometime soon.  We probably only have room for 1 tree (this is my vote:  http://bethtrissel.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/redbud.jpg) and 1 shrub though, so if you are one of our fellow Bostonians and have a good place to plant a tree, let us know and you can have one of ours when they come!

Here are the after pics...

The day we laid the sod down

The pile of leftover sod (actually still sitting there) and our fancy compost bin

After a few weeks to take root and grow

Now that size garden I think I can handle