A New Garden

We have been settling into our new home and it has been so great so far. It is really exciting to be able to have our own space. We went from a two bedroom apartment with one bathroom to a four bedroom 2.5 bath home. So we have a lot more space to put things, which has been really nice.

We have a lot of plans for future improvements, but nothing is really very urgent. Most of the house is great, if not up-to-date, it is at least in good condition. With the way building costs are at the moment we don’t really want to get into home improvement projects just yet. The one area that we do want to change is our yard, mostly because we like growing a garden, as you well know. So, this past weekend we tackled the corner of the yard where we plan to plant this year. We are going to start small, relatively, and expand from there.

The far corner of our property had a pile of branches and some dead trees. We think that at one point it was a flower garden type area, because it has a cement boarder and we found flagstones all over the place. There was also a bunch of grass and other ground cover growing through it. I forgot to take true “before” shots, but here are some pictures I took before we had gotten much done.

We got all the branches picked up and loaded into our truck. Tyler dug up a stump that was growing mushrooms and had been mostly covered by plants.

Then we took out the tree that had been partially knocked over by the huge wind storm that hit this area in the fall. They had cut most of the branches off and it was still partially in the ground. Tyler had to cut more of the roots then we rocked it back and forth until it started to come out. Then Tyler cut more of the roots and dug around it some more, then we rocked it more, he jumped on it and cut more roots. Then it finally came out. It really wanted to stay, but we put up a fight. It was in the back corner so it was mostly out of the way anyway, but taking it out made the corner seem much more open.

We dug up the grass and all the vines we could find. We raked out all the dead branches, and we pulled out all the flagstones and piled them up. We are thinking we will use them for some other area in the yard at some point. We still have a bit of work to do before it is ready for planting, but we are making progress. Here is what it looked like by the end of that day.

It is a work in progress to be sure, but we are getting it done. I will post again after we get more done. We are going to be adding some kind of compost or fertilizer. And before we plant we want to install some kind of watering system, but we haven’t figured out exactly how we want to do that yet. So, more on that in the future as well.