The Garden

I think I've hinted in previous posts how much work our yard needed when we moved in. After all that blasted snow finally melted, Josh and I got to work on the rose bushes, the lawn, and the flower beds. It's been a nightmare trying to keep up on weed control (anyone else facing serious morning glory woes?) and lawn maintenance, but we sure try. We get behind when we go out of town, but we've obviously made some progress because neighbors frequently tell us how excited and grateful they are that we're doing something about the yards because the previous renters did not. If I had a dollar for every hour Josh has spent replacing broken sprinkler heads, adjusting the spray, and substituting nozzles for the greatest coverage, I'd have enough to buy all y'all a slurpee. If you throw in the time he's spent fixing the lawn mower, I'd have enough to buy him a new one.

Anyway, in between all of these projects, we had to hurry and put in our garden before it got too late in the year. We brought our planter box up from Vegas, but didn't know exactly where to put it. There was a weedy corner of the back yard with a couple of bushes in it that we thought would work, so Josh started pulling all the weeds to make it more attractive for our box to live. One of the bushes was a rose bush, and we discovered that it was actually dead and not just hibernating from the winter, so Josh had to pull it out. This is what we were left with:With the rose bush gone, there was too much room for our planter box, so Josh built him some friends to fill up the space:We wanted to make the area as pretty as possible for as little money as possible (remember how we're on a tight budget all the time so we can buy our own house to put our money into?) so I used all of our email addresses, our current address, our Vegas address, and my parents' address to print off some of these Lowe's coupons. Good thing I did, too. Even with these coupons, plus a $10 off $50 Lowe's purchase I found on the back of a magazine, we're almost $200 into our garden, but that includes the new boxes (plus two more small ones), all the filler (peat moss, vermiculite, and compost), the decorative rock and bark, and all the plants and seeds. Josh had to dig up underneath the bush to replace the sprinklers' water filter, so it's just messy dirt under there right now, and we're going to stain the outside of the boxes so they all match, but it will be finished (again) very soon. Josh has done such a good job. We couldn't be more pleased with our small bit of tranquility sitting outside!This is the view from the street. All that grass is ours, and it goes ALL the way around the house. It takes us at least 2-3 hours to mow and weed-eat it all. Josh is dying for a riding lawn mower, but that kind of purchase comes only after we're mowing our own grass!
So there you have it. We've already harvested tons of super-yummy radishes (I'll be planting those again later this month for a fall crop) and we took out our peas and broccoli. We didn't plant early enough and they never really produced. But everything else looks good to go! We have three tomato varieties, zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, strawberries, red potatoes, honeydew melon, watermelon, beets, carrots, lettuce, bush beans, red peppers, and jalapeños. And everything is already looking so much more vibrant than they did last year!