We added on to our backyard garden quite a bit this year! We wanted more gardening room and also wanted to cut down on the amount of lawn to mow and trim so we pulled out the lawn in about a 12' radius all around the boxes, butting all the way up to the deck on the house side. That side probably got at least 15' ripped out. We then mulched in the whole area using the free city mulch. It was quite the project that took several weekends to do-cutting and hauling sod takes a long time! With the extra space we hope to build and add at least 2 more garden boxes, but that addition will be saved for next year. This year with the empty space we added 3 big sunken in flower pots for decoration and also planted 3 vining plants that we hoped would spread all around the boxes and make good use of the space-one pumpkin, one watermelon and one squash. None of the vine plants are really taking off though, so we'll see how they do!
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| A view of the whole thing from the side of the house. Notice our COMPLETELY brown, dead lawn. We are having a horrible drought here and haven't had any rain since May. Some of our trees have already lost their leaves too and we've even been soaking the trees to try to save them. Luckily while we were gone on vacation our friend was so kind as to water the garden for us. I'm sure absolutely everything would be dead otherwise. 8 days with no water and 90+ temperatures would have done everything in for sure. |
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| A close up of one of the flower pots:) |
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| This year also saw the addition of a rain barrel which is pretty laughable since it's only gotten filled and used ONCE with the drought we're having. Not the year to spend the time and money on a rain barrel hoping to save money on the water bill;) The little green plant in the mulch to the right of the barrel is the pumpkin plant. |
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| We wanted some type of border around the garden. I'm hoping to eventually have a beautiful fence, cloaked in beautiful perennial butterfly garden flowers all the way around with an even more adorable arch covered gate entry. This year we settled on a thick row of marigolds. Baby steps:) Never underestimate however, how long it takes to plant 2 full flats of marigolds! That was several weeknights every night after work. |
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| The view from the deck, clockwise starting from the bottom left: box # 1 has 2 bell pepper plants and 2 tomato plants. So far we have gotten 3 bell peppers and one tomato from this box. box # 2 has 5 more tomato plants in it which are doing great! Lots of blossoms and little green tomatoes on them so far. box # 3 is half sugar snap peas and half green beans. The peas are doing great, we lost about half of the bean plants to some type of bean plant eating critter though. box # 4 has 2 rows of carrots that are looking good so far and also had a row of radishes that we already picked. The barrel in the middle has basil in it. Just today I bought all of the necessary olive oil, parmesan cheese and walnuts to get my first batch of pesto in the freezer using some of the basil:) |
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