On Saturday, Hubs and I spent most of our day outside prepping our giant yard for the upcoming spring and summer seasons.

We have a ton of ideas and projects and plans for out there this year, all of which are quite exciting and fairly major projects.

However, we decided it probably made since to start at the beginning and not get ahead of ourselves too much…which meant raking leaves, cleaning out flower beds, raking leaves, mowing the yard for the first time, raking leaves, pulling weeds,…and did I mention raking leaves?

I’m not sure why it seems like this, maybe because we’re used to living in the country where the wind blows most of the leaves away…somewhere…, but we have so many leaves. So so many.

As in, I’m in disbe-leaf about how many leaves there are out there.

(Pause for groaning and/or giggles here.)

Anyway, we picked up a wheelbarrow at Home Depot last weekend because we knew we’d be needing it for garden soil, when the time comes for that.

As it turns out, we needed it for hauling leaves.

Since our yard backs up to a cattle farm, we already have a pretty messy fence line back there. It’s full of dead limbs (not but there by us), piles of leaves, trash lumber, etc.

So, we figured we’d add out own leaves to the mix, although hopefully this giant pile is only temporary.

We have plans to reuse a lot of these leaves when we fill our garden beds with dirt, to make the soil more light, and add some compost-able material in with the heavy soil.

(Side question: Any ideas on where to buy soil?)

We like the idea of reusing the leaves for a better purpose. Plus, it saves us the money of paying for our trash service to haul them away…it’s not included in the regular price.

I’m sure it will be a pain to reload the leaves onto the wheelbarrow and cart them over to the garden beds, but at this point, we had no other choice. We couldn’t leave them on the grass any longer.

In fact, a lot of our grass on either side of our driveway looks like it might already have been damaged by a combination of the drought last year, the extra snow/salt/road debris from this winter, and the mass amounts of leaves that got packed down onto it from all the snow-shoveling we did.

We’re not planning on sodding, and summer isn’t the best time for seeding…which is a pain to do anyway, so we’re not sure on what sort of plan we have to “fix” our front yard.

In the meantime, check out how much nicer everything looks without the leaves!

We still have a lot of outside work to do this year, but I have high hopes that it will become a pretty great space…eventually.

What sort of projects are you working on outside your house? Any landscaping, leaf-raking, weed-pulling, or yard mowing progress in your neck of the woods?