See our first garden transformation

From April 2013, through April 2015, we documented the changes we made to the yard and garden of our first home in the Montavilla neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. We were inspired by the story of a young photographer in the 1970s named Ken Griffiths who created a photo series taking a picture of an elderly couple in their garden every season.

Lawn first covered both the front and back yards (except for the patch of river rock in the rear that was used for RV parking in previous decades), but slowly, over the course of two years, we converted the entire yard to an urban homestead, complete with chickens and twenty-seven raised garden beds that grew crops all year long.