Check it

Look at these little dudes!

Evidence of a mild winter. I hope we don't get socked with something in March that kills off our baby lettuce.

Yard mishaps

The day after we finished the south-side fence, we decided to get serious about laying down the rest of the weed fabric. We have plans for mulch and drip-line sprinklers, but we wanted that barrier layer down first to save us some weeding down the road (we hope). It's not exciting work, so I present only one finished picture:

Then, I wanted to take advantage of the small gap between the finished fence and the retaining wall along our south patio to plant some vines that will eventually grow up over the fence:

In the course of digging the holes for those vines (thank you, Millcreek Gardens Groupon...), Tai got a little overenthusiastic with his post-hole digger and struck the neighbors' sprinkler supply line. We noted that line when we built the house and poured the retaining wall — it's on our property now as a throw-back to the days when their house and our lot was one piece of property — but had just forgotten that it was there. One geyser and a frantic dash for their water shut-off valve later, we had ourselves a lovely mud hole:

Tai is a total pro at sprinkler lines now, though, so the only casualty of that evening was the cancellation of BBQ plans (and our DIY home improvement pride). Instead, we dashed to Home Depot for a few inexpensive PVC elbow joints (we still had 1" line leftover from last spring's installation) and some primer+glue for the pipe. Tai had it fixed within an hour, and cleaned up by the end of the night.

So now we have a finished south fence and a fleet of trumpeter vines growing along its base. Now all we need is some sunshine with which to enjoy all the hard work...

Lettuce harvest

Here's the picture of that lettuce harvest I was bragging about. Last September's planting yielded enough mixed greens (butter leaf, mesclun and spinach) to wow an extended family dinner. I'll be planting again this fall in every square inch I can find...

Planting

To say that I didn't know what I was doing in the garden last year would be an understatement. I didn't really garden growing up and had no real experience digging in the dirt. I didn't appreciate the importance of space for mature plants, watering schedules, and hot/cool spots in the yard and sun. I thought I could do no wrong and made all manner of transplanting mistakes that killed many innocent plants. I also suspected that it would be rewarding and delicious to eat food grown in our own garden, but I had no idea how satisfying it would be.

Lessons from last year that I'm incorporating into this year's planning and gardening include:

1. Plants are amazing. I love watching them grow. It's totally worth it to me to plant something just to watch it grow, but it's nice if it produces something delicious at the end of the season, too.
2. Pumpkins, zucchini, squash, and tomatoes are enormous plants and must be given lots of space. Not just one square foot. Oops.
3. Broccoli isn't really worth the trouble, even though the plants are pretty.
4. You can never plant enough cucumber vines. Home-grown cukes are incredible.
5. If the lettuce isn't in the ground by the beginning of March, forget about it.
6. On the other hand, overwintering lettuce and spinach works really well -- the other day I pulled a delicious huge harvest from the garden that was planted last September. The greens woke right up with the longer days and warmer spring weather without me having to plant a thing.
7. Overwintering carrots didn't work.
8. Our kitchen garden space is great for early and late-season gardening, but it's so hot during the summer that I am only doing warm-weather vines in that space this year. If those don't work, that garden box is coming out and I'm planting a shade tree stat.
9. Purchased seedlings need to go in the ground quickly, or they will die. Forget about tempering or hardening or whatever it's called. I will forget, and they will fry.
10. Who needs flowers? I used the un-landscaped spots in our front yard for pumpkin vines last year and loved it. It was instant landscaping at almost no cost and lots of fun to watch. This year I'll do a variation of that happy accident with melon, pumpkin, and basil.

Thus far this year I have planted seedlings for chives, tarragon, cilantro, strawberries, tomatoes, basil, peppers, shallots, cantaloupe, and watermelon. I've also put seeds in the ground for cucumber, rosemary, beans, peas, squash, another melon variety, and another cantaloupe variety. I have plans to plant seeds for a couple of pumpkin varieties, zucchini, more basil, and more cilantro once the weather is warm for good. Photos to follow, if/when these things survive.

First signs of a fence

The first good-weather Saturday of the year last weekend meant that we were actually excited to work in the yard, despite all the digging and weeding ahead of us. We're putting in a fence on the edge of our patio, so while I went to the Wasatch Community Gardens plant sale Tai got right to work digging the post holes.

By the time I got back, he was nearly done with the five holes for this part of the fence -- it took so much less time than we thought it would. Probably because our clay hasn't yet baked into solid rock yet (July). The holes were about 30 inches deep -- the bottom six inches or so are filled with a layer of gravel to drain water away from the post base and prevent rotting, and the other 24" are filled with concrete for stability.

You can see my haul from the plant sale in the foreground. I got three feather reed grasses for our parking strip, two creeping mahonia plants to join the four others already on our north side, and a few veggie and fruit starts for our garden boxes that I'm hoping to not kill this year.

While Tai worked on the post holes, I got down to weeding. I guess our weeding policy this year has been "if we ignore it, they'll die, right?" I faced reality and spent the morning on my hands and knees getting rid of this mess:

After (I know you don't care, but this weeding caused me substantial physical pain, so I'M SHOWING THE PICTURES):

Brother Daniel came over to help Tai set and level the posts. I was making eight-legged enemies among the weeds so I don't have any pictures of the laborers. But here is evidence of their hard work:

Along the way I learned that you don't pre-mix concrete for post holes -- you just dump a bunch of the powdered stuff in, then add your water. Neat.

Next up for us is finishing the fence (hopefully this week, if we can get some cooperation from the weather), and leveling our remaining exposed dirt and putting down weed fabric. Before we can do that, we do have to take care of this little mishap:

This gash is more than a year old and dates to our appointment with the sprinkler trencher. The pipe was buried rather shallowly (and the trencher wasn't really, um, paying attention), so this sliced conduit has been exposed for the last 12 months. The wires aren't live, though, so we've sort of ignored it until now. We're hoping to get our electrician out sometime this week to repair it for us.

Oh, and we finally got rid of this abomination:

So now I'm sure the Smurfs are mad at us.

Mid-summer yard update

This is the year of the great squash experiment. Not knowing a blessed thing about the plants we were planting (as in, did you know that pumpkin vines can grow to be 35-40 feet in length? I didn't!), we have overloaded our tiny backyard garden box with two pumpkin vines, a yellow squash vine/bush, a zucchini plant, four cucumber plants and two broccoli plants.

The overall effect:


Up close with squash overload. Zucchini in the top right and one of the pumpkin vines in the bottom left:


Produce! This is so far the only pumpkin we have produced for our pains. It is ripe, beautiful and lovely. So now we have a pumpkin in August.


These pumpkin vine tendrils wrapped themselves around patches of grass in the backyard, holding on for dear life. I think they're gorgeous on their own, though.


The broccoli...that we're hoping will turn into something edible one of these days:


The cucumber vines and our nascent basil plant:


Fresh cucumbers from the garden are our top delight this summer:


Pepperoncini, for which I have my doubts, mostly due to serious overshadowing by pumpkin leaves:


That's all in one garden box. In the other backyard box, we planted a couple of varieties of carrots (Danvers, Nantes, Little Finger and Carnival Blend -- Carnival was the least successful).


And this is what happens when you get a radish packet from Matthew Moore at Sundance and figure, eh? Why not? But then realize that neither of you like radishes (nasty little things):


Then, we have a third garden box (clearly in over our heads) by the kitchen. By and large it has been scorched by the heat and exposure of our site, but a few things have survived. Namely, the tomato plants that I didn't kill are now threatening to take over the house:


And this is the end of a fight with arugala. It started out so lovely, with spring greens that we added to salads and quiches. It ended with an insane patch of flowering plants that crowded out everything else. So I hacked it back:



...and made room for a watermelon vine that has showed its appreciation for the extra space by doubling in size over the last few days. I'm still hoping that this will produce something before the first frost.


In the rest of the yard, our front yard on the south side was not getting full coverage from the sprinklers. So now that Tai is a pro, he added a few extra heads to hit our borders:


But the best thing about the summer has been slowing down and enjoying the results of all our hard work over the last 18 months. It's a bit surreal to think of where we were a year ago and where we are now. That was a lifetime ago.