Show your 'Before & After' photos

Hey all;

I thought it might be nice to have a place where everyone can show some Before & After photos of their projects, gardens, or landscape. I'm looking for your own Before & After images, not of other peoples' places. I find that looking at photos of my projects really helps me to stay encouraged and enthusiastic. It helps a great deal to see that in May the garden area was just a blank canvas, and today it is a rampant and productive garden. Well, the beds that got built are rampant and productive. Lots more to go!

I also think that if people can see images like this, of just us 'regular folk' having successes, it will inspire and encourage others. That's the plan, anyway. So, post your inspiring and encouraging Before & After pics, if you're feeling like sharing.

Here are some of mine.

And my Mediterranean herb garden. I really love this one.

And here is the first permaculture project I tackled - the Herb Spiral, of course. This is actually a hugelkultur herb spiral. There are 6 big rounds of wood under there, along a with a massive stump we pulled out of the yard, grapevine cuttings, weeds and grass, and wood chips.

The first photo is last year's building of the spiral, and the last two are this year. As you can see, it's doing well. It is about 10 feet from my front door.

Now, surely somebody else has remembered to take before and after photos!

The garden before:





Basically a blank canvas! Of awful soil, full of buried bricks and old mattresses and burnt kitchen units.. delightful.

Now, it's impossible to get a single photo of it all!




Some of the beds are closed off as had to spend a lot of time in hospital this growing season.

How wonderful, Charli!! I love seeing lawns turned into productive spaces. What an amazingly beautiful job you've done.

Thank you so much for sharing. If that doesn't inspire someone, I don't know what will!

Thanks Tracy!

I actually can't believe how much we've done in 4 years.. you do it gradually and forget. I harvested 8kg of wineberries this year, I've got about 10kg of squash ready, enough courgettes to sink a ship, 3 eggs a day from the 4 chickens, more lettuce than I can eat- and I didn't use most of my annual space this year!

Four years?! That's fantastic. I have been amazed at what I have been able to produce in our new garden beds this year. I'm excited to see where I'll be in four years. Can't wait for chickens!

You can see my progress in this thread Here: What I've done in the last five years  

They are pictures of my food forest experimentation site at year -1, 3 and 5.  

Here it is from the other direction just as I started digging and then again four months later once the cover crop and other seed mixes had gotten established.  

Beautiful, Craig!  It definitely helps to take "before" photos in the dormant season, the change is always so dramatic.

Awesome thread idea, in a year or two I will have to share some here. Right now though my property is pretty much all before pictures. Lots of work to do to get the after pics now.

What a wonderful transformation, Craig. It's these really attainable results that I love to see. Another inspiring site.

Tracy Wandling wrote:What a wonderful transformation, Craig. It's these really attainable results that I love to see. Another inspiring site.

Thank you Tracy.  I've been working hard on this for a few years now and hope to have a lot more info available over the winter this year covering how I managed to get where I'm at.   I've been documenting a number of different locations on my land to show long term progress, as well as describing the more intricate details that tie it all together.  I'll be spending the winter uploading a ton of video showing what I've been up to over the past few years.  I'm really happy to see that others are having great success as well.


Keep up the good work everyone and keep the updates coming

I also had fun making a hugel herb spiral, built over an old stump with alder logs added to build it up.

At the beginning of making the herb spiral (February 14th, 2015 ):


Picture taken today of the herb spiral (September 9th, 2016):



This garden bed was built between two apple trees, as a sort of hugel/lazagna bed (alder logs at the bottom, with duck bedding, horse manure, leaves, ash, random food scraps and ferns in layers, and then purchased topsoil for the top 2-4 inches.)

Before (September 25th, 2015):


After, a little torn up, but still thriving, after a freak hail storm. (September 9th, 2016):



Reading this thread makes me realize how few pictures I have of my property at large for before and after. I'm usually just taking pictures of the areas I'm working on (or my kid is playing in). I need to take larger scale pictures, too--even if they aren't always "pretty"!

Nicole, I love your herb spiral of randomness. And your apple tree bed looks like it was pretty prolific!

We took GOBS of photos when we bought the place, and I'm really glad we did. It makes it so easy to see how far we've come.

Water harvesting basin before and after

Oh, how I dream of a pond! This looks gorgeous. How deep is it?

Unfortunately it's not actually a real pond, it is an infiltration basin (not compacted).  When full it is about three feet deep.  It is only full during wet periods, and is meant to slow and soak the water in.  I wish we could have a real pond, but they are very expensive to construct and in our climate might be dry most of the time....

But this basin does a convincing impression of a pond during wet times, with wild ducks and everything!

Well, a seasonal pond is better than no pond at all, I guess! And you're definitely doing the land a favor. Maybe someday . . . we can dream, right?

Seasonal or not, that pond is amazing!

We started this campus on an empty high-altitude desert plateau in Ladakh next to the Indus River in 1994, and started the garden in 1995 or 96. The picture of harvesting in 2013 is approximately the same location and angle as the 95 / 96 picture. The picture called 'Very first garden" is another spot that we ended up keeping ungreened, as a playing field, but the location of the final garden is in the background, the cart in the left center of the photo.

Astonishing!

Oh. My. Inspiring. Okay, I'll remember not to complain about my sandy soil and dry summers. I'm good.

Here's my 'forest garden' before and after