How that yard was when we moved in – full of trash and vines.
When we first moved into our new home, the yard had this awkward fenced in area inside of our fenced in yard. It was full of broken junk that was overcome by vines that were slowly creeping into our yard. We debated on what to do with it, after staring at it for two months. The initial reaction was to take down the fence and just keep the parts for spares. “What are we going to do with a cramped fenced in area in the back corner?”
Bear with me – I still haven’t figured out how to keep the images I already posted alone out of my slideshow.
Anyhow, as you can see, we ripped out the vines. Not a fun job. Then we discovered a bunch of border stones underneath. Yay! We decided to use these border stones to build up a small vegetable garden. The main perk of building up and filling in with dirt was that we knew our veggies would get at least some great dirt to start in.
So…step one. Ripping out all of those vines. There isn’t really much to say about that step – as it is pretty self explanatory. My main piece of advice is WEAR GLOVES. The vines are sticky and really kinda creepy. I think I said more than twice how alien-like they were to me. The way they grow was just so invasive that it made them seem less plant-like and more alien-like to me. haha
Step two…empty out the trash. This is the fun step where we discovered all of the border stones stacked along the fence. We also discovered a broken patio chair, parts to two different broken patio tables, and some random lawn equipment that, you guessed it, was all broken.
Step three…till! Kevin & I are fortunate enough that we inherited an ole’ rototiller that has a slight mind of it’s own – but it gets the job done! So after removing all that vine-age and garb-age, Kev got to work wrasslin’ the tiller to do his bidding. Yay dirt!
Step four…border stones become slightly raised garden. One thing Kevin noticed after tilling was that the large tree in our yard + the small tree in the fenced in area = a lot of random roots. As a result, the raised garden was an especially good idea. There really wasn’t much skill to this step, just manual labor of stacking the stones in a shape that fit inside the enclosure.
Step five…fill with fresh garden soil and till again! Self explanatory really.
Step six…regular ole gardening time. We ended up planting while it was pouring down rain. But we wanted those plants in the soil as soon as possible.
It’s been about 6-8 weeks since we’ve planted and we now have big plants with lots of flowers and some even with some vegs on them! We planted a variety of tomato and pepper plants. Plus we have 3 cauliflower plants that we didn’t expect much of that surprised us and are doing rather great. We’ll post a progress shot soon!
412 reasons to love 