In the four years I have been in our home, the backyard has seen some significant changes. The first was it’s clearing.
 

 
As with the front yard, the back had seen years of neglect. Trash was piled high and the blackberry bramble had taken over. The only real “features” were an abandoned avocado tree that a neighbor says stopped producing fruit in the mid-1980s, a loquat tree, and two towering poplars. I cleared the debris and made way for the second event, which was our wedding.
 

 
Dipak and I decided to hold our nontraditional Hindu wedding in the backyard. Our family and friends were very forgiving of the sloping grade, sinking chairs and brisk evening temperature. The food was great, the music even better and, well, we got married. The third event was the installation of a chicken coop. I’ve provided more details on how we developed the chicken coop in the posts about the coop.
 

 
The fourth transformation was the collapsing of an eighty-foot poplar tree. Notice the smashed chicken coop.
 

 
During a storm in February 2006, a gust of wind ripped one of our poplars in half. The first half, slowly but definitively crashed through our back fence and onto a gas station directly behind us. It crushed a car and ripped out a phone line that provided service to our own and a couple of neighboring homes. As it turns out, I was standing approximately fifteen feet from the tree as this occurred. Having gotten a safe distance and realizing the tree was not falling in my direction, it was hard not to stay riveted and watching. I immediately reported said incident to my husband. We looked through our window in time to see the other half teeter and fall to the side through a side fence, directly on top of the chicken coop (the hens miraculously survived even after the firemen pronounced them dead when I asked that they be rescued. Note: chicken rescue is not high on priority list). This tree half ripped through our neighbor’s lovely citrus orchard and onto her house, punching a discreet hole in her roof in the process. It was disastrous. Over the next couple of days, I was not feeling particularly inspired by the fact that our chickens had taken up residence in our basement and were laying eggs on the stairs. However, in the midst of chaos, Dipak made a brilliant observation. He noted that there would be full light in the back now for me to plant a garden, a full garden. A full vegetable garden!
 

 
So we rebuilt the coop and I created beds for our new garden. The last transformation, and perhaps the most profound, has been the creation of an organic edible landscape. Over the two years this garden has been in the making there have been subtle but deep changes. One has been the shift in the variety of weeds growing. There were very few weeds in the back. Garlic chives had invaded the entire space making a garlicky thick grass each spring. However in the short two years of composting, turning and cover cropping, there are now many opportunistic plants enjoying the soil. Another big change is that the sad and brittle avocado tree has grown glossy leaves and even flowered for the first time after many years. It has yet to be determined if this flowering is from the soil or from an old farmer’s trick of whipping a dormant fruit tree (more about that later). Either way, it is apparent that the soil has improved, plants are finding greater nutrition, and the ecology of the backyard has shifted into abundance.