The Front Yard Garden

It was a beautiful day outside. After lounging in bed for a while this morning and making breakfast, Pete and I decided it was the perfect day to make some serious progress on our yard and house.

When we first moved into our house, I didn’t get a heck of a lot of pictures. We moved in summer solstice of 2008, and with moving and everything else, we didn’t get very far beyond planning the first year we were in the house.  The first spring we were in the house, I was conveniently mostly unemployed, so we were able to plan and put in a fairly substantial garden.  We played with the idea of putting the garden in our back yard, but the fact it is north-facing combined with the fact our neighbor was using chemicals on his apple tree that drifted into our yard encouraged us to put it in the front yard.

So, we planned five garden beds, each about 2-3 feet wide and between 6 and 14 feet long. I am still working on digging up the photos I have of that time, but here is the not-so-great cell phone pictures of before and after putting in those beds:

Yeah, our neighbors all thought we were crazy. We were told that kids would dig up the garden, that putting it in the front yard was “dangerous.” The biggest problem we had with putting our garden in our front yard, honestly, was that we didn’t have enough room. Neighborhood kids showed interest only in the fact that we were playing in dirt. We grew, harvested, and preserved carrots, bell peppers, tomatoes, hot peppers, herbs of all descriptions, corn, beans, pumpkins, radishes, snap peas, potatoes, broccoli, spinach, arugula, and lettuce. So, this year, we decided to add extra space.

It was a beautiful day outside, and we were done adding the extra 50 sq feet or so by 1 p.m. So we made a pilgrimage to the local hardware / general store and got some extra soil, some *awesome* tomato cages (don’t worry, pictures coming soon), and a new tool that I very much intended on attacking the dandelions with. I may have gone a bit overboard when we got home… I dug up the dandelions in the driveway, in the front yard, and then started on our much-neglected back yard. Because the previous homeowners / tenants had parked an RV in the back yard, it wasn’t in great shape when we moved in. Combined with pretty much ignoring it last year so we could get the back porch ripped down and rebuilt, it had pretty much entirely reverted back to weeds. I dug up weeds until I got a blister on my hand… then kept going for a while. Whoops.

BUT – we got grass re-seeded in a fairly sizable chunk of the yard. Pete put down shredded newspaper to help insulate and fertilize the grass seed, and we’re hoping it’ll actually grow. If not, well, we’ll have to see what else we can do. We have to have some chunk of backyard to have BBQs in over the summer, after all.

To see more pictures of the day, including the Smudgie cat enjoying outside time, check out the Flickr set.