What we started with

Well, we started with a typical suburban tract home. Not quite cookie-cutter and a little larger than most, quirky definitely describes our house and barren describes our yard.

Two large pine trees in the front yard plus some sort of flowering bush thing. Not much yard, but I dislike mowing anyway.

The trampoline mowed over half of the trees in the back yard one particularly windy night. One choke cherry down and one to go. They are sort of pretty trees as far as foliage color goes and spring flowers, but the fruit is rather inedible and leaves a huge mess. Plus the plant sends out suckers all over the place. Very annoying.

Our lot is approximately 13,200 square feet, a good 60-75% of that is house, deck, concrete and a shed.

My daydreams for the property include:

For the outside greenscape

adding rows of raised garden beds in an effort to provide most of our own produce

possibly getting chickens, ducks or goats

changing the raised area in the back of the yard to accommodate berry bushes, grapes and maybe fruit trees

For the outside hardscape

turning the shed into a greenhouse

adding a greenhouse on the south side of the house for four-season growing

composting all our food waste and recycling what we can so we produce a minimum of landfill waste

figuring out a system to harvest rainwater

For the inside

totally changing the inside of the house

building our own hot tub