Wow, it's already been a month since you visited. I didn't think my garden had changed that much until I looked at the photos from last month. It is much greener and hopefully more of that green is from flowers and vegetables than from weeds.
Above you see the garden area around the children's play area. Don't worry they have a lot more room out front for a pool, riding bikes, and general mayhem.
We have started work on the vegetable garden expansion of 2012. Every year I end up adding to the garden. Instead of digging all that gravel filled dirt out we are going to build raised beds. The expansion will go from the fence behind my husband all the way to right in front of where I'm standing to take this pic.
The children's beds are doing well and are very colorful. I love walking by here and seeing their budding love of gardening growing. They have all been pulling weeds, watering and the two older children have even bought their own plants.
And now we are in the side yard. I have a little sitting area on the patio here next to the lawn.
And here's the lawn being watered. My husband added compost to the low spots and then more seed to the bare spots. It's filling in nicely now. Pretty soon I will get to use the push mower every few days to keep it neat.
This is the sitting area under the grape arbor. I added five little beds to the perimeter and filled them with impatiens.
Look at all the baby grapes we have!
The two beds in front of the sitting area aren't producing well. I have some greens and beets growing there along with weeds.
And now you are looking down our property to the back fence. It's a long garden on the sunny side of our 1/2 acre.
Here is the official entry to the veggie garden. The herb garden is in the middle. I finally remembered to plant the grow bag my mom gave me a few years ago. I planted it with red, white and blue flowers in honor of my oldest son who is in the Air Force.
I planted 9 tomatoes and 12 peppers in our backyard. I decided to try growing the tomatoes in the same place as last year after reading it can be beneficial to use the same site for a few years.
Here are a bunch of potatoes which I have already had to cover a few times.
Flowers
The back view of the veggie garden. It's a mess of weeds right now.
The lettuce which seems to be taking its time growing.
Sage
The strawberry beds. Only about 1/4 of the bare root plants I planted made it. I will only buy potted strawberries from now on. I planted pole beans along the edges this week. I might add lettuce and greens to the empty beds.
Here is something which surprised me. One of our pea plants has colored flowers. They are not scented so I don't think they are sweet peas just a mutation or something. I'm looking forward to checking out the pea pods to see if they look like the rest of the peas. I'm not sure we will eat any peas from this plant. I need to do some research and see if I can figure out why it has colored flowers.
An iris
And that is all. I'm so happy you came to look through the garden with me. See you next week for a post on building raised beds.
Briana is your Garden Columnist for The Christian Home Magazine.
