To Rake or Not to Rake

This is my somewhat leaf-less yard. 

My theory about the raking of the leaves is that:

1) I don't mind raking leaves. It's nice to be outside and the dogs are outside so it's a win-win.

2) If I wait for ALL the leaves to fall from the trees, then the leaves will be SO heavy that I will have a hard time raking them and it will take a lot longer to do it. 

3) I see raking a lot like laundry. I know when I'm starting a load that it's not going to be the only load I do, most likely, I'll have to do 5 more in that day.

4) I'm not asking him to do it so why can't he just appreciate that he doesn't have to do it and it's getting done... :) 

So, what's your theories on raking leaves? Are you a wait until all the leaves have fallen from the trees and then rake once? Or do you rake a few times over fall? 

Shall we say... Un-gardening

Being injured is no fun so instead of being crazy all fall and going on lots of adventures, I have been working in the yard... oh, and it's been raining all late summer/fall too so there isn't much we can do... So, instead of beating my body up more, I decided to beat up my yard a bit.

We moved into our house in February and we knew that there was a large flower garden in the yard, but wasn't sure what to expect. We allowed the former home owner to come and dig out some of her flowers in the spring so by the time summer came around, we really weren't sure what was going to happen. Mostly because I didn't want to get into the whole "we must fix this" mentality, I decided to just let everything come up, see what it was, and then decide what to do after that. Things started to come up and I liked some of the stuff and didn't like others and at the end of the day, decided that it all must go!! It would be so much easier to start with a blank slate then trying to work around what was already existing. So, for the past few weeks, I say that I have been un-gardening. I have been digging, hoeing, ripping, digging, cutting, etc etc. to get one blank slate. I'm really excited for the spring to start building our own garden to accompany the vegetable garden and I'm sure there will be lots of pictures to share.

Here is the left side of the veggie boxes before my digging started:

This is mid-process: 

Now it has grass seed so that we can have some more yard back:  

This is the right side of the veggie garden before: 

After digging ended and before tarp was added: 

Peonies were removed and hummingbird feeder will be replaced in the spring and tarp was added to keep the soil warm, keep the weeds from growing and aid in the composting of what wasn't picked up: 

And before I started digging, this one little rose was standing among the other stuff and so the rose got to stay... it's pretty much the ONLY thing that got to stay!!! 

Now I need to sit back and wait for the winter to pass so that I can start some seedlings and get the "flower" area to grown. I still want to have a more of a functional/edible garden so I'll be getting blueberry bushes, planting some echinacea, some sunflowers, but I do like the pretty things to so I might be adventuring in some of the hibiscus plants too... we'll see!!!