Projects, Projects... & Garden Update

I have not been in this space for a little while, life has been happening!  You know how that goes. We have been so busy this Spring doing much needed work in our yard.  This is the ugly yard we had at the end of this winter.  The shrubs had all died in the unusual multiple snow days we had, so they needed to be chopped back to make room for new growth.  Plus the grass that we've been trying to grow for three years never really took.  Then the wind blew in all sorts of weeds.  I had wanted to have a dirt pit lined with tree stumps in the back corner but my boys & their friends enjoy bug hunting and would never leave the stumps in place.  Not to mention I hadn't thought about them digging up sprinkler pipes!  Yikes, our tiny yard was a mess!

So we decided to cheat and put in sod.What a difference it has made.  The whole family now gravitates to the backyard. 

 

The oleander shrubs have been chopped and new growth is coming up beautifully.  The chicken wire fence is not finished yet.  Hopefully this will help with our garden pests, toddlers & cats! 

My seedlings didn't do very well, so I bought plants.  We've been having very hot days and they just never took.  Mental note, start seedlings earlier next year.  Here we have bush type tomatoes, a Patio vine type tomato in the back, sweet cherry peppers, "Big Jim" green chili, lemon Cucumber, cucumber, cinnamon basil, nasturtium & french marigold seeds.  

The pallet garden has been very hard to keep wet for seeds in our hot climate.  So except for two herb seedlings I've given up. I'll get plants here & there to fill it in.  In the meantime its providing a good spot for the yellow squash & cantaloupe to rest upon while our grass establishes.  I'm not a huge fan of the edging but we put in an invasive kind of desert grass that eventually will try to find our garden. We may put in another square foot garden bed here this fall.    

Here we have vine type tomatoes, basil, zucchini and we just added some french marigold seeds along the edge.  The buckets are a small compost system I'm trying out.  Hoping it works, I haven't been very successful in this area and my husband is not hopeful.  

We made a sandbox too! We're hoping to surround it with some terracotta tiles & fill it this week.  The kids are getting excited for it, but they've had something else to play with out here.  

  

Our fairy garden! We're still working on it so more on that soon!

Until next time...