Beautimous!

Blueberry patch

This weekend I reclaimed my garden from the kids!

A couple summers ago I deterred my kids from digging holes in the yard by letting them dig in the patch of dirt just in front of the blueberry bushes. Little did I know Thomas would enlist all his friends to help him dig a hole to China (or a tunnel under the fence, depending on the day).

Dirt from their hole ended up surrounding the garden, killing the grass and burying the brick edging. The whole thing was a mess, and any kid that came over couldn’t help but need a bath by the time they left.

This project was so easy and took just a couple hours, so now I’m on a mission to restore my entire yard to its original glory (read: it’s pre-Lucy days).

Side view

This is the side view. I went to McLendons for an extra bag of bark mulch and discovered their perennials were 20% off. I bought a few purple cone flowers and a yarrow for this corner instead of waiting until Spring. Eventually I want to plant orange poppies to the left.

Mosaic stepping stones

Most of the work was done with materials I already had, so the only money I spent was for the bark mulch and flowers. Here, I used a railroad tie to border the blueberries and create a stepping stone path to the water spigot. The kids and I made these stepping stones at a music festival we go to every summer.

All in all a very productive weekend, and I’m completely motivated to keep going!

In the ground.

plantings

I have to be honest, I was a little worried about the future of my veggie garden after the Sickness of 2008. I was laid up from mid-April to mid-May, which is usually when I do all my spring pruning and garden preparations for planting. Not that I’ve done this a million times, but this was to be the first year of my full fledged garden after last year’s trial run of tomatoes and green beans.

But well-timed sunny weekends gave me the opportunity to till under the dirt (last week) and plant these lovely seeds (today). I’ll plant another set of these rows in a week or two to stagger the harvest. I also planted two groups of pumpkin seeds, and three groups of zucchini seeds.

I was going to plant corn, but I need the entire garden space to fit all the rows in, so maybe I’ll do that next year.