Some of you may remember that last year I started renovating our backyard. We'd removed our leaking swimming pool and were left with quite a mess. I got some inspiration online and started from the middle. The plan was to have a little room to sit and use the rest of the garden to grow vegetables.
This is where I left off last year:
That would be a fireplace and one raised bed. We had all these grand plans of building the rest of the raised beds and filling them up before March, to make sure I had the whole planting season to work with this year.
Well, life got in the way. So picture the garden like in the pictures above, but with lots and lots of weeds overgrowing it. That's where I started a few weeks ago.
But... I worked through it and by the end of last week I had this:
The plan was to raise that bed a bit higher (there's a concrete slab about 7 inches deep in the front half of it), but there's no way we're getting to that this year. So I'm just making do and putting in plants that don't need to root very deep.
Of course I couldn't wait to plant something in it. Since it was rather late in season I bought some plants to put in and searched for crops that could still be sown this late. (Oh! Isn't it wonderful that I was able to do this planting on the first day of Summer? It just felt so right to be digging in the soil on that very day.)
Doesn't that look wonderful?
We finished the bed we already built last Saturday (it just needed to be lined so the soil didn't fall out). It took just a few bagsof soil (ha! kidding, it needed 70 bags) to fill it up... (we need to buy the soil in bags, the backyard is over one metre below the level of our house and there is no way we can ride cars, trailers or even wheelbarrels of loose soil down there, we have to carry the bags in by hand).
I instantly moved the leeks to the deeper bed. I think they'll like it better there.
Now there is one more bed to be improvised (the rest of the garden and some stairs for easy coming and going will have to wait till next year), some more leeks (one of my favorite vegetables) to be bought, some seeds to grow (though if they all come up I have no idea where to put all the plants) and a lot of plants to be watched and pampered (or not - they seem to grow very well on their own).
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This is where I left off last year:
That would be a fireplace and one raised bed. We had all these grand plans of building the rest of the raised beds and filling them up before March, to make sure I had the whole planting season to work with this year.
Well, life got in the way. So picture the garden like in the pictures above, but with lots and lots of weeds overgrowing it. That's where I started a few weeks ago.
But... I worked through it and by the end of last week I had this:
The plan was to raise that bed a bit higher (there's a concrete slab about 7 inches deep in the front half of it), but there's no way we're getting to that this year. So I'm just making do and putting in plants that don't need to root very deep.
Of course I couldn't wait to plant something in it. Since it was rather late in season I bought some plants to put in and searched for crops that could still be sown this late. (Oh! Isn't it wonderful that I was able to do this planting on the first day of Summer? It just felt so right to be digging in the soil on that very day.)
Doesn't that look wonderful?
We finished the bed we already built last Saturday (it just needed to be lined so the soil didn't fall out). It took just a few bagsof soil (ha! kidding, it needed 70 bags) to fill it up... (we need to buy the soil in bags, the backyard is over one metre below the level of our house and there is no way we can ride cars, trailers or even wheelbarrels of loose soil down there, we have to carry the bags in by hand).
I instantly moved the leeks to the deeper bed. I think they'll like it better there.
Now there is one more bed to be improvised (the rest of the garden and some stairs for easy coming and going will have to wait till next year), some more leeks (one of my favorite vegetables) to be bought, some seeds to grow (though if they all come up I have no idea where to put all the plants) and a lot of plants to be watched and pampered (or not - they seem to grow very well on their own).
