Sunday, June 12, 2011

Garden PIctures!

Now that I've found our camera, I can add pictures of the garden!

We currently have a total of 350 square feet, and we're hoping to add another 142 square feet of raised beds by August. Our ultimate goal is 1,200 square feet of vegetables to supply our year-round vegetable needs. We'll see!

Here's what it looked like before we erased the front yard and started over. :)

Here's the whole front yard:

On the right is the raised bed with tomatoes, cucumbers, various greens, eggplant, and flowers (for bees!). In the front center is a flower bed. In the middle of that bed is part of a brick gate support that was coming loose so we knocked it down. Makes a great flower planter. I'm thinking of turning the satellite dish on the roof into a bird bath and mounting it on the brick "planter." Towards the right you can see the herb spiral that we made out of the part of the driveway we had to break up to fix a pipe.

Off of the herb spiral are four beds: sweet potatoes, zucchini, zuchinni/watermelon, and tomatoes/peppers/watermelon. Too much zucchini but it was one of the few things left that could be planted in late May! We were caught by surprise this year. I'm sure two zucchini would have been more than enough, but we have eight. Plenty to share! Couldn't just let the ground sit there.

Here's a good view of the herb spiral:


And a sideways view of the whole thing:

That's what I see out my kitchen window! I really want to take down all of the cabinets in there and add more window so I can it all better. It's fun to look out at it and very fun to eat it! We're looking forward to getting more and more done. Bit by bit. We pretty much only have Sundays to get much work done, but we've managed to get to it nonetheless. To maintain it really doesn't take long at all during the week. Maybe 15 minutes of weeding per week, and 10 minutes of my time per day to hand water and sprinkler water it. Soaker hoses are in the future, BE"H!

2 comments:

Tzivia said...

That spiral is such a beautiful thing - the herbs must LOVE all the sun reflected off those rocks... nice work!

alpidarkomama said...

The spiral also creates micro-climates. There's the sun side/shade side and the drier top and wetter bottom. Pretty neat idea!! It was fun to build. :)