In late 2010 my partner and I bought a lovely 1896 Victorian in Oakland on 5,000 sq ft. It had stood empty for several years and had the usual urban squatters occupying the house and garden at various times. RE: various crack pipes in the attic, backyard overgrown, uncared for, and filled with broken glass and trash.Here's a picture of it in October 2009 when we first came to look at the house:Here it is about a year later. Not much is going on accept we have one raised bed in. We took out a couple of the rampant plum trees, pulled up tons of black plastic, a took out all the gross jade plant and a bunch of other boring stuff.November 2010:In summer of 2011 I put in an herb spiral in the center of the yard:August of 2011 we have TONS of veggies growing. This was the summer of the 20 million tomatoes and 10 million of zucchinis:Here it is right now. man, it looks pretty crappy from overhead...The herb spiral is mangy and cleared out and the over crop on the greensward area is not filled in. you can see our new big-ass white coop in the back left.June 2012:At some point early on my plan was to have a mostly native garden but I ditched that in favor of sticking with food plants and at least Mediterranean plants. There were just too many awesome plants out there to experiment with.Back yard == 2000 sq ftFruit trees so far: 2-3 plums, meyer lemon, lisbon lemon, orange, lime, two apples and two avocados.Animals: 6 chickensBeds: 2 large veggie beds, herb spiral with flower bed attached, native bed, 3 round planters with blueberries, strawberries, zucchini and herbs.Other elements:awesome chicken coop and run, embankment slide, kids playhouse area under lemon tree.Left over from some cute little old lady who must have lived here once: many pretty roses, fuschias and a camellia.Plans: Eventually I'll put in a native meadow for our grassy are and we'll have a deck. I keep waiting for the supposed construction we need to do on the house to be over but we keep not getting started with it so we just keep doing cover crops and our patio table is on an old rug. Our 2011 backyard had a sad dearth of actual flowers so, MOAR flowers!