Our poor, pitiful backyard

When we moved into this house, it had obviously been quite some time since anyone had taken care of the lawn(if you can call it that!). Probably 99% of the vegetation was weeds.
Exhibit A:

I suppose the cheapest thing to do with a yard like this is to leave it, but a nice lawn makes a big difference when you go to sell your house and so we wanted at least try to improve it. We decided to start with the front yard last fall, and briefly considered buying sod. The price tag was pretty hefty, though, even with our neighbor’s landscaping discount, and so we decided to go on the cheap and grow grass from seed. This method requires only a little bit of money, but a lot more time and patience than sod(and we have more time and patience than money!). We killed all the weeds and my neighbor came over with his bobcat to scrape them off and mix up the dirt. After that, we seeded and watered, and now we have a much better lawn going in the front. It’s not perfect, as you can see in this picture(which is of the same area as the above picture).

…but it’s an enormous improvement over what we had before. Anyways, this fall we’re tackling the backyard. I didn’t get a true before picture, but here’s what it looked like shortly after the weed killer was applied. You can easily see now that there are some spots that didn’t get hit…the green stripes are still alive! We’ll take care of them this Saturday, hopefully.

So, while it looks really dreadful at the moment(it’s gotten browner and more crunchy since I took those pictures!), hopefully after putting in some sweat and tears, we’ll have something that looks more like our front lawn.