My desert garden transformation

[Ostrodamus]

Here are some before and after pictures of my backyard. When I moved in with my girlfriend 18 months ago, the family had been using the backyard as a junk collection station for 25 years.




Here is the garden after a few thousand dollars of COMPLETE soil turnover, soil amendments and leveling. Sadly, due to the new baby, we didn't get many photos of the now thriving garden in its peak, but here it is at the start of the season.

 

[Meadowlark]

That is an amazing, inspirational transformation, @Ostrodamus

 

[Tetters]

Cor, you have made a superb job of that! I think you will find that as you go on, your efforts will reward you time and time again. Well done. As your new baby grows, daddy will be able to teach him/her the joys of growing plants - it is a wonderful way to learn from a young age.
Don't forget to grow a few flowers to pick for mummy to have in a vase indoors. It sounds as if she has done rather a good job too.
Congratulations to you both!

 

[Anniekay]

Wonderful job !! Over how much time have you worked on that? It must have taken a lot of trips to the dump to just get a clean slate to work with and you have ended with a perfectly organized garden !!

 

[Ostrodamus]

Cor, you have made a superb job of that! I think you will find that as you go on, your efforts will reward you time and time again. Well done. As your new baby grows, daddy will be able to teach him/her the joys of growing plants - it is a wonderful way to learn from a young age.
Don't forget to grow a few flowers to pick for mummy to have in a vase indoors. It sounds as if she has done rather a good job too.
Congratulations to you both!

Thank you very much.

 

[Ostrodamus]

Wonderful job !! Over how much time have you worked on that? It must have taken a lot of trips to the dump to just get a clean slate to work with and you have ended with a perfectly organized garden !!

I worked on it from the end of February 2023 until July 2023. I missed that season (travel). I came back April 2024 and worked on it up until this very moment. In all, around 11 months of active work. I actually managed to trick the garbage company into picking up all my dirt for free, as "yard waste", so I incurred no monetary overhead for that portion of the process. I will say that I used around an actual metric ton of dirt/sand/soil. The bulk of that number was leveling dirt. I had to wait for heavy rainfalls to come and flood my yard so I could photograph it and engineer a leveling plan. All material you see is 100% reclaimed/reused/recycled things that I pulled out of the junk.