Backyard Garden Month 3

Kind of crazy to believe that I have only had all this stuff planted for two months!! With the warmer weather, things are really growing now! And I am learning some valuable gardening lessons as well. . .

Let's take a look back a month ago:

Ok.

And now. . .

Crazy what a month can do!!

Celebrity tomatoes getting bigger and bigger (this pic was taken a week ago)

Pie pumpkin blossom (don't have any growing pumpkins yet - until recently, the male and female flowers have not been open at the same time and my efforts at hand pollinating have been unsuccessful, but finally the plants are sending up lots of blossoms all at once so I hope soon we'll get a pumpkin growing!)

The scarlet runner beans - I love how these have been blossoming so I have a few pictures of them :)

Sunny boy yellow tomatoes

Bell peppers and jalepenos are fruiting now

My massive tomatillo plant - it is literally taller than I am at this point, reaching about 6 ft tall!

Tomatillos starting to grow

Here's the beans growing up the trellis (and you can see a preview of the new beds that are going to be added soon!)

The first sunflower is getting ready to open!

A bumblebee on the scarlet runner beans

So, there's all the pics! Since everything really took off growing this past month, it has been within the month that I have learned a lot of things:

1. Tomatoes get BIG.  I actually had no idea they could get this large - I saw pictures of 6 ft high, 4 ft wide tomato plants in various books, but come on - they were gardening books that the author wouldn't be writing a book if they weren't some sort of super gardener, so I just kind of disregarded. The tomatoes I have grown in the past maybe got 2 1/2 ft tall in their containers. As it turns out, planting them in the ground is a whole different situation. . .

       What I will do differently next time: I will not waste money on those small wire cages you get from Lowes or Home Depot (well, I guess I already wasted that money. . .) but I will get hog or cattle panels (whichever ones will allow me to stick my hand through it and pull awesome fruit out) and make them like this: 

That way my tomatoes won't be on top of each other, climbing out of the beds and into the lawn and smothering every other plant I have planted nearby (and being so close they are more prone to massive caterpillar attacks and the spreading of diseases. . .)

2. No pumpkins.  I admit, this was more of an experiment than anything (I took some seeds that started to grow on the side of the driveway after Husband went all Office Space on an old pumpkin last fall before throwing it (kind of) in the compost pile):

I knew pumpkin plants get big but it is totally dominating and it is not really being very productive either (every female flower to this point has not been fertilized I guess, and the baby pumpkin has turned yellow and fallen off every time). I guess we will see if this changes. Maybe I will get 10 pumpkins. I doubt it, though (but if I do, it will be at the expense of every other plant in its vicinity). You can see the effects of the drain on nutrients by comparing the two sides of the garden that have scarlet runner beans:

The left side plants are no higher than two feet up the trellis (and this pic was taken 2 weeks ago!) and the right side is thick with leaves and blossoms all the way up to the top and extending past the top! And the leaves on the left are more yellow than the ones on the right. So, no more pumpkins. . .

That's all for now! Maybe I will try to update more frequently :)

Backyard Garden - Month 2

Things are growing quickly around here so I want to try to keep track of it for once! Despite some crazy cold snaps at the end of March, things are looking good. The scarlet runner beans my daughter planted finally came up (after taking between 1-2 weeks for most to break ground!) and my spinach and lettuce seedlings have sprouted, and the cucumber seeds are now planted. Here's some pics of the garden 1 month ago:

And now. . .

The tomatoes are almost 2 feet high at this point!

Above are some spinach seedlings - hopefully I'll be able to get something out of them before it gets too hot!

Tomatillo flowers

Scarlet runner beans

Sunflowers in the upper right hand side

Pepper plants

Two of my blackberry plants have finally started to leaf out

Some of the others are coming up from the ground

We'll see what the next month brings!!

Front Yard Bed Done!

I say that, but really I still need to add mulch. But all the foundation plants are planted and the hardscaping put in!

I had been struggling for a long time about what to do with the front bed. It was originally home to Dr. Seuss-shaped yaupon, calla lilies that were always in a state of half-death, and enormous lantanas that, though, beautiful, produced nice clusters of beautiful berries that look just like blackberries. My toddler loves berries, so they had to go too.

Here's a reminder of what the front bed looked like when we bought the house (this is the only picture I have from the real estate website):

It looks fine from this angle, but until we took everything out, I had no idea how much it completely blocked the house (and the gorgeous azaleas in front of the windows (you hardly even knew they were there!).

This is what the front bed looked like after my husband and his dad ripped out all the yaupon and a small tree:

Yep, neighbors were probably not too happy about this eyesore (especially since it was like this for a couple of months!)

Once everything was ripped out, I realized a problem: the middle is just a big expanse of nothing and it is going to take a lot of plants to fill it.  Another thing I needed to keep in mind was that I wanted to convert this place (and more spaces in the future) to a mostly edible landscape (or if it's not edible, it should attract pollinators). I went back and forth about what to do, and even wasted spent an entire naptime staring at the front yard in hopes that something would come to me.

Then, last Friday night (late) the idea to put a hardscaped path and sitting area with a bench in the middle amidst some shrubbery and my varigated pink lemon tree came to me. I sketched it out and began on Saturday.

I finished the hardscaping on Saturday (which before I could do that involved leveling the whole bed which took a good couple of hours), and then Sunday I bought plants, amended the soil, and planted the main shrubs and trees. Monday, I finished planting a few of the flowers.

So here's how it looks now (keep in mind, it is only March so as things get growing, spaces will tighten up a bit):

Here is a list of the plants I used (including some that you can not see in the picture):

1 Varigated Pink Lemon Tree
2 Meiwa Kumquat Trees
6 'August Beauty' Gardenias
2 Lemongrass
2 Society Garlic
1 Mexican Honeysuckle
3 'Mealy Blue' Salvia
6 Angelonia
3 'Tifblue' Blueberry
1 'Climax' Blueberry
1 'Premier' Blueberry
1 'Sunshine Blue' Blueberry
2 Pineapple Sage
2 Mexican Bush Sage

The blueberry plants are planted on the ends of the bed. Assuming they do well, they can get as big as 6ft + so they will definitely fill in the space!

Well, that's all for now, but once things start growing a little more I will fill in a few of the spaces with some edibles (definitely some herbs and possibly some veggies too!).