the yard.

I’ll finish our one-year house tour with the yard. I won’t lie, our front yard looks a little scrappy. It’s shady, which is nice, but the downside is there isn’t much grass. Also, that red gravel path really is the pits. Small children love to pick up the rocks and transfer them to various other parts of the front yard so that the whole thing has a kind of speckled effect. But isn’t the porch nice and inviting? Don’t worry front yard, some day we’ll give you some love.

As you know, we’ve put our efforts into the backyard this year. And by “we” I mean “David.” We did hire a company to put the privacy fence in, but otherwise he’s cleared the yard almost completely himself (and has had more run-ins with poison ivy and taken more rounds of steroids than we can count).

I love our tangle of garden these days. I head out, barefoot, to pick fresh basil for pesto and mint for tea. Something new and exciting appears on my kitchen counter nearly every day. Today it’s beet greens, which will go in tomorrow’s smoothies.

The side yard was completely overgrown when we moved in.

And the playhouse. Not getting much use these days thanks to the boiling heat, but it’s time will come again in the fall.

Our friend Spencer designed an amazing covering/pergola/shelter for this concrete slab. I’m not sure when the project will begin but one day it’ll be an epic place to hang out.

Here’s a year’s worth of yard transformation:

We love our backyard!