Our Garden and Yard

We've been hard at work learning the ins and outs of what it takes to up keep our yard and garden. In the spring I was feeling pretty good about how easy it might be. Let the flowers bloom and die off, weed a little and mow the lawn. A month later and all heck has broken loose!

First we started with pruning all of the trees. When I mowed the lawn I was getting beat up from all the long branches from all the trees on the perimeter. I found a tool for cutting branches off thinking I'd cut a few of them off. What I thought would take 30 minutes turned into a whole day affair. To get the branches high enough to not hit me when mowing I had to keep chopping and chopping and chopping. Our oak tree (at least that is what I think it is) is massive and was drooping to the ground! Then my neighbor brought over his chain saw and hacked off a few long limbs for us from several trees. I was told to make a fire and use the soot for the garden..... huh? I collected enough for 3 massive bon fires. (We do have some un-used land behind us and I admit that I secretly threw some of the pine tree limbs over the brush!) I was scared to do a bon-fire by myself but a quarter of the yard was being taken up so I finally just bit the bullet and started burning.

Next was our garden. Bebba was awesome and helped us get it started. Then my neighbor Kelley offered up a few of her extra tomato plants. Debbie and Mark (really Mark) helped me put a nice fence around our garden. I was eager to plant more veggies so I got 8 cherry tomato plants from Kelley and bought some more zucchini, peppers, cucumbers and melons as well. (Remind me to tell you about this trip as it was the first, and hopefully last, time I've lost Cooper in a store- it was traumatic.) We had to buy a bunch of large pots and potting soil and stakes for the tomato plants. When I got it all home I thought hey it would take maybe an hour! Again it was an ALL day task.

Then came weeding out the flower beds. That was a 4 hour job at least once a week. If I wasn't so against it I could see spraying stuff to keep the weeds at bay! We also have a Mimosa tree that sprouts out little tress ALL over our yard. We have a few that obviously took hold a few years ago against the base of the house and a few that are trying to grow under our deck. We took a full afternoon to go hunting these little seedlings to pull them up so we wouldn't have random trees growing all over the yard. 9Didn't matter as they have popped up ALL season long.) Then we had to take out a tree that was growing in the azaleas and pull out half of the ivy that is taking them over. My neighbor suggested pulling all of the ivy out now but after a full large trashcan full of ivy I was done. I haven't even hit the other side of the front yard that has poison ivy in it. That may be one of those wait for the hubster to come home on that one.

But I can say now with pride that we had a nice garden this year as well as a little patio garden. Being that this is our first year doing a garden I just wanted to try it all out. I learned a lot about placement of the plants and lost all my zucchini and squash to a random tree growing in the middle and to mold. We got about 3 peppers and about 10 cucumbers and a nice amount of tomatoes. Not enough to not have to go shopping but I think with what I've learned next year will be a lot better.

The other concern was the 7 deer, an enormous amount of rabbits, wild turkeys, a fox. We had an issue with mole holes ALL over the yard for a few weeks and then they disappeared. The boys loved to help me water and weed the garden. Bear likes to sit on the ledge and talk to the cucumbers. He also likes to pull all the tabs I put in the ground that tell me what is what and change them but that's another story :-)

I feel like we wasted a lot of good compost material so we went and bought a compost bin last week and are working on filling it up so that will be another learning experience for us!! In just a few days the boys are already used to keeping their scraps for the composter. It's amazing to me just how quickly they adapt!