We just bought a beautiful house in Forest Lake, Minnesota on 2.8 acres of land. It's not the best land - mostly forest and wetlands, but it's ours, it's pretty, and we love it!
Amber took some pictures around the property and wrote a few comments about them below.
This is our yard, as seen from the living room and dining room. I took the picture when we were still looking at the house, quite a while before we bought it. Winter was just ending and everything was raining and melting and kind of ugly. The previous owners left all their leaves on the ground and it ended up killing a lot of the grass. That's right, this picture is from spring, not fall! The little road on the left is public, and the little road on the right is our driveway. Yes, we will have to shovel ALL THAT. I'm asking Santa for a snowplow this Xmas.
Once we bought the house, we took 3 straight weekends just to clear all the leaves that had been left mashed into the lawn. Here is Jon trucking around on Murray the Tractor with a cute little trailer to carry the leaves away to the compost pile in the woods. (That is the neighbors' house in the background on the left. I should probably get some pictures of the actual house loaded pretty soon, eh?)
Everything got a lot prettier as summer kicked in. I found these Bleeding Hearts and Violets on the south face of the hill that the house sits on. We also have daisies, roses, columbine, dogwood, irises (white and purple), lilacs, hostas, flowering ornamental onions (!), at least a couple kinds of lilies, and many other kinds of plants and flowers all around the house. I'm sorry I haven't taken more pictures yet, but when I do they will be posted here.
This is a picture I took of our meadow across the road with the sun setting at my back. The lower area back by the trees is our pond. I have seen deer, turtles, cranes, herons, and ducks (mallards and wood ducks) there. This spring I've seen baby wood ducks, too!
No pictures of them yet, but I hope I can get some soon before they grow up.