That would be nice. I would love to have good peaches, apples and strawberries. The ones around here are horrible. To think I used to have enough in OK to fill an entire chest freezer every summer with fruit. I am planting blackberries, a fig, pomegranate and dwarf peach this fall. Also, going to experiment with annual strawberries and annual rhubarb this winter. This winter, our neighbor was putting big grocery sacks of oranges, tangerines and grapefruit on top of our fence. My husband was bring bags and bags home from school. We have two lemon trees and my parents have one. I drive by dozens of orchards and they sell seconds of oranges/grapefruit in 40-50 lb boxes for 4.99 if I need some before the neighbors start giving it away. My little electric citrus juicer for $29.00 earns it's keep! I buy a big box or two and juice 1 gallon at a time,getting about 2-4 gallons per box.

Houseful-thanks for all the detailed pictures! So cool how you have transformed that space! This house is in Arcadia, we are currently in the East Valley. So...one thing we are playing with is the idea of keeping the original flooring. That requires moving as few walls as possible to keep repairs/replacements to a minimum. So that is informing the following ideas: I am currently toying with the idea of having a doorway from the library to the kitchen that lines up with the doorway to the dining room. With both the kitchen/library and kitchen/dining walls being half walls opened up above the lower cabs, if that makes sense. So I could see out the dining room windows at a sink and the library window at a cooktop possibly. Lining up the doorways would direct traffic through the kitchen but maybe that would be okay since my work area would be all on one side of the doorways? If we did this you would be able to see the backyard from the library and view out the front from the dining room... Rosie-the garden room was not built according to the plans and is just a room with a huge skylight...I was thinking of keeping it, but with half walls so when you enter the house you can see through it to the back windows...I was thinking of making it a small play room with a couch under the skylight. (Skylight is quite long and narrow along the wall opposite the door). A friend of mine has a reading couch under a skylight and it is magical to stretch out and read there during rainstorms... I like the idea of the kitchen in the middle, I think...Now, it is desirable to do less for the flooring reason, but I want to think big and I would love ideas that grab space from anywhere, really. We are mere days into months of planning so my initial thoughts may change dramatically. I would love to tear out as little as possible but I am open to considering it nonetheless!

If you can come up with an old piece of chain link fence and a couple logs you can make a drag to pull behind the mower. Basically the chain link will scrape a little dirt off of the high spots and drop it in the low spots. It may take a little while but as long as it's not too bad this will work wonders for smoothing out the bumps. If it were me, I would hold off doing anything that will leave you with bare dirt for now. Otherwise you will end up with more weeds to deal with and there's a good chance you could have some soil erosion from storms or heavy rains during the summer. Leaving the weeds alone will allow them to hold the soil in place. From there, get started with the "destruction" process in mid to late July. About 1 week prior spray everything with RoundUp to kill off all of the weeds. Once the destruction is complete and the lawn area has been smoothed and ready for seed begin watering lightly 3 times per day for a couple of weeks to germinate any weed seeds that were left behind. By lightly I mean just enough to keep the very top layer of soil damp. Spray anything green again with RoundUp. By this time all this is done you will be into your ideal time for seeding which should be mid to late August for you. In the meantime, use the search feature here to learn proper seeding, watering, fertilizing, and all the other stuff involved in maintaining the new lawn as all this is important if you want the lawn to be successful. It's really not too hard but you don't want to spend all this money to have it go wrong. You've got a good group of folks here on the forums to help you through it and answer any questions that come up along the way.

Tropicbreezent - HOLY COW! That's a big tree to pug but very cool. You do have an advantage. I'm in SW Florida... As a transplant, by way of Chicago, to me it FEELS like the tropics in summer but I'm still sub-tropics so I probably need to be a bit safer. Thanks so much for posting the pics; I feel better about pugging my tiny woody ones. Duly noted on painting the cuts. I'll hit the hardware store this weekend for white latex and then I'll wait to see these guys recovering before I think about cutting. Tony - That's really cool. I am not an intuitive person at all when it comes to gardening so I'd love to take classes! how many mangoes do you get from a tree the size in your picture? I'm trying to figure out in my mind how you balance keeping a tree small for picking while still big enough to get a lot of mangoes. I could have an 80 ft. tree in my space but I don't want to struggle to pick them or have 100s of rotting fruit on the ground when I don't pick them.