How does our garden grow???

When we moved in to our house our back yard was a mess!! It had several nice features like 3 very good sized fruit trees and lots of room. It also came with lots and lots of weeds. It has been just over a year now and I though I would show you some of the progress we have made as well as some of the ideas we have for our yard. I couldn't find very many pictures of what the yard looked like when we moved in, but there are a few.
This is the start of one of our bigger projects of last year. We had 2 of these large tires to empty and move. We got rid of one and moved the larger of the 2 to the opposite end of the yard to become to center of our future raised garden beds.Here it is in place with the beds around it! Yeah! Jeff got these built this last weekend and here he is scooping cow poo in to them so we will have lovely dirt to grow lots of yummy stuff in next year. Thanks Jeff and Alysun.
Here is another picture from last year. My mom, Heidi, and I are trying to tame down the weeds in the beds along the house. We had some that were over 6 feet tall! Right in front of Heidi you can see and small green plant, that is the rhubarb we planted last year.
Here is our rhubarb this year with a few herbs around it. In the last week I got the pavers set in to frame off the bed. I also made the planting area of the bed bigger by sifting 4 5 gallon buckets of rocks out to have a good hose area with rock under it rather than rocks with a lot of dirt covering them. Yeah!
Here is the bed on the other side of the sliding glass door. These are all dahlias! This week I am hoping to finish off framing this one. It shouldn't take too long as my sister has already squared off the bed.
This shows some more of the progress we have made this year. Jeff is taking down the suckers from the center of our pear tree. Some of these babies were over 30 feet! The tree had really been neglected for along time. We got a few off of it last year, now it is loaded. Yeah!

Also notice the lovely trees running down the fence in the right of the picture. We think these were supposed to be a hedge, but as with many things in our yard they were neglected and got about 12 feet tall. They are now gone! Yeah! Thanks Nic. We are planning on putting grapes along this whole fence.
We have also added an entertaining piece to the yard. Thanks to my wonderful husband and one of our college group guys, we have a 10 minute fire pit - they were speedy! We have had a fire at least once a week in it to make s'mores. Eventually we would like to do a dry set paver patio with the fire pit built into it.
I though this was just a cute picture of me and the girls. This is how we have been getting through these last few really hot afternoons. Neither of them really like to get all the way in the pool, but they really like to copy mommy!
Awwww, Jeff's pride and joy! The manure we got was chaulk full of lovely red wrigglers - which is apparently the correct type of worms to use for vermicomposting. He dug through the poo to get enough to start his worm bin. Also note you can't see ribs in Jeffs chest!

That is about all we have done. There is a whole lot more to go, but at least we can see some progress. Please let us know if you have any tips for getting rid of weeds, chances are we have it in our yard. Our battle cry will be "death to morning glory" for the next several weeks as we try to get rid of the retched weed. Then we can decide what to do with the the 5,000 dandy lions that have taken a liking to here. Funny thing is the park that is along 2 of our fence lines has no weeds. Oh, the wonder of chemicals.