Monday, May 4, 2009

Food Not Lawns

This has been a very productive week. I bought a ton of vegetable plants last week and we finally planted the vegetable garden! I'm much more of a vegetable garden person than a lawn person, so we decided to tear out the lawn in the back yard and put in a garden. It happens to be the sunniest location on the lot, so it really is prime veggie real estate. Little by little, over the last few weeks, Jose and I have been tearing out pieces of lawn and turning the soil under. It really is nice dirt, and I'm hoping to have a great crop this year.

Originally, we were going to tear out the entire lawn, but since we got the puppy, we decided that it's been nice to have a patch for her to play on. The only problem with that, though, is I was kinda counting on that space for some of the vegetables I bought before we got her. Now I have to get creative and figure out where to put some of the larger, sprawling plants like to pumpkins, winter squash, and melons! I actually really love this part of gardening--figuring out how to make it work and look really cool at the same time.

My mom, spreading out compost with a little 'help' from the puppy.

Community effort! Molly putting up the fencing to keep Scout out. We were going to do this at the end, but since Scout started tearing everything up immediately, we had to do it first!

Me in the newly fenced in garden, ready to plant.

Scout isn't very fond of the new fence...and she can squeeze through it, so we might have to move to Plan B, whatever that may be!


Well, at least some of the rocks we inherited on the property have proven to be useful!


The almost finished garden. I ran out of room for the pumpkins and acorn squash, so I'm clearing the area on the left along the fence to plant them.


6 comments:

Ian Carter said...
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Ian Carter said...

Wow- that looks amazing. And Scout is so cute. I got a little sad seeing her, like I missed her or something. What did she do to my "i don't love dogs" heart?

I have a feeling plan B will have to be something WAY sturdier and higher! Good luck with that!

Sweetpea_and_Pie said...

That's a big garden!! It looks great. What are you going to do with the land on the other side of the sidewalk? I'm glad you left at least a little lawn to lounge on.

Hopefully you'll just be able to train Scout not to go into that area. no fence will be strong enough!

Ashley C. said...

I'm not sure what we're going to do with the rest of the back yard yet. I think we're not going to do anything permanent yet. I want to wait it out for a while and see how we really want to use the space. Eventually the vegetable garden is supposed to go on the side of the house once we clear out all the gravel.

And actually, so far, Scout only tries to get in the vegetable garden while I'm working in it. Otherwise she seems uninterested in it. We'll see what happens when she's big enough to just step right over it!

Molly said...

Wow! The finished product looks really good! You are going to have a beautiful vegetable garden! I can't wait to see it growing.

Chris said...

This really is the way vegetable gardens are supposed to look. I have only 1 tomato plant. You could still plant the pumpkins on the side gravel yard. You'd only need to remove some gravel and work the soil.