House of Bennetts

The front of our house for a while looked like this, with the green shutters and the awkward garden bed.

Then we had the fence installed and the shutters and trim painted.

Awkward garden bed remained.

But this was the plan:

yard

A few weeks ago we had some lovely yard folks clear out the garden bed, expand it to be parallel with the front porch, and rototiller in about 10 bags of compost to amend the soil. They failed to remove all of the tree roots from the VERY large tree nearby, which made the digging of holes ROUGH.

I then went with a co-worker of mine to pick out plants for the front bed and thank the sweet baby Jesus that we had his help. He worked his tail off helping us... LB almost died pushing this cart without the benefit of vision.

We got home and my co-worker and I spaced everything out on the weed blocker goodness that our yard guys had put down.

I did too much that weekend...

...but we got everything in and two weeks later, EVERYTHING IS STILL ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's a miracle!

We planted everything and then went to get soaker hoses. In hindsight, I probably would have opted for spray soaker hoses so that we wouldn't have to be soooooo careful about where to try to bury them. But we are doing soaker hoses for about an hour at night and then a quick spray watering as well.

We also just got about 20 bags of mulch from Home Depot, LB spread it all around, and we called it a day.

I am quite happy with my new view from the front porch.

As fall and winter come, I have no idea what I am supposed to do/not do, so let's just hope I can keep these babies alive.

Alas. I failed. I warned all of you that I was no green thumb. That gardening is something I have never done before and that I was just sort of winging it. Back in April, I got these tomato plants from Whole Foods...

And they did well in my window! Growing and looking mighty fine. And then I planted them in a spot in my garden I had never been through a summer with previously. I had no idea how much the trees and shrubs in my backyard would shade these bad boys.

My backyard garden spot started out like this and I was oh, so optimistic. LOOK at all the sunshine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AND LOOK. Back in June... a PEPPER! (Yeah, yeah, it got eaten by a bird before I could get it, but food! In my garden. Said bird jerk is also the reason for the black netting that got put over everything.)

IMG_1441_2

The tomato plants GOT HUGE (height wise) but here we are... September and not a SINGLE SOLITARY tomato has ripened enough to eat. Not one. See those little bastards in there? All green and plump. And yeah... this picture is dark... because that is how the rest of this summer has been: dark, stormy, CRAPPY.

Everything just got WAY overgrown. The tomato plants totally took over and even further shaded everything around/next to/behind them. You can also see in the picture below that the strawberries have failed as well. Yes, there is red ... but the berries are the size of my pinky nail. No joke.

You see, everyone tried to tell me that because this was the wettest and coolest Colorado summer, my garden never had a fighting chance. AND YET, at work, a gal canned something like 309485094 jars of tomatoes from her Denver garden. Maybe not that many, BUT COME ON.

And don't even get me started on the peppers... well they are still hanging around, but are also just WAY too small to do anything with.

Gardening

So, this is now the "plan." I am taking everything OUT of this back garden spot. Next spring, I will plant everything up front, next to the house and use some sort of raised bed action.

I am actually thinking of getting rid of the red brick up front and doing raised cedar beds "along" the house. Or, once we take out the pine tree along the left side of the house, do raised beds along there. I also am thinking of hiring a landscape architect to tell me what to do and then doing it myself. I am also thinking that I never want to garden again and will just go broke buying food at the farmer's markets. Any thoughts on what to do bloggy buddy gardeners?