Landscaping weekend of doom complete! Crushed rock got compacted, pathways got at least roughly dug out (stoopid tree roots :P), turf, paper and topsoil got distributed over most of two garden beds, and sand got almost all filled in and leveled - I have the last little crescent to fill in by myself tomorrow, and then I will start hauling rocks. I was going to get Corey to help me place the heaviest ones tonight, but those are going right in the middle, and in order to get to the middle at the moment one would have to stomp through all our soft, squishy, beautifully leveled sand. So I'll start at the edge and work my way across. We spread a tarp over it for the night to prevent neighbourhood cats from using it as a luxury-sized litterbox; hopefully they (and any other suburban critters) will be disinclined to walk on that.

All this accomplishment is thanks to the yeoman service of my darling husband, who has been a baby-minding, sand-schlepping, rock-compacting SUPERSTAR for the last couple days. It's also thanks to my mom, who took over the baby-minding for the later half of today, and who used her mad productivity mojo to ALSO get groceries, make dinner, and clean the fridge (!!!) I think I may sneak out to her house during the day and leave her some flowers or something.

Looking back over previous pictures of the yard, I have to say that I am THRILLED TO PIECES with the effect of all this renovation, which you can totally see taking shape at this point. The whole yard will have so much more...more...I don't even quite know how to put it. Structure? Definition? Pizzazz? This setup actually puts all the space in the yard to work in a dynamic way, whereas before the space was just sitting there empty and useless (except for attempting to grow straggly lawn). Tomorrow I will take some progress pictures.

The remaining problem, of course, is filling the gardening spaces, because they're HUGE. Even doing one per year is going to be a significant challenge. As I said to Corey this afternoon while throwing turf and topsoil around, "holy CRAP, this is going to be a big fucking garden bed. What have I gotten myself into?" His response: "oh, you know, the usual." Heh. Touche.