Step One to Having a Japanese Gardening: Clelaning!

Okay so we have this goal to have some kind of japanese garden in our backyard, or at least something calming but we have this small problem, okay not smalll problem because we worked on it for over six hours yesterday and it is still not cleaned up! There is all this overgrowth from the guy who lived here before us (and also from us not cleaning it up at all since we bought the house) that we now have to clear off before we can have our japanese paradise. So here you go, our giant rubbage pile before we started:

Any kind of annoying vine or poison ivy or small tree or ant or roach etc. etc. that you can imagine probably lives in this patch of our backyard! I literally filled eight or nine wheelbarrows full of green crap that was growing back here! At least we now have a large composting pile now :).

Underneath it all is a brick patio that we had starting trying to uncover early and then given up because it was so full of weeds!

So after six hours of work here is our progress!!!!!

No we aren't quite done yet (I whimped out and decided I didn't want to spend my whole vacation day pulling weeds haha) but I think with more saturday morning or weekday afternoon we should be able to finish up and spray round up all over the patio! We're one step closer to our paradise garden!

Oh yeah and while I was shoveling I almost shoveled up this giant toad that was just sitting on the pile of dirt :). He just sat there on my shovel and stared at me like "who are you to move my dirt man?" haha.

Also this weekend we got our first produce from our garden! Our very own homegrown cherry tomatos :). We had them on salad and they were delicious!!