We moved into our house we're in now back the end of April this year. When we started setting up a garden we only found one outdoor faucet to hook our hose to for watering our garden and all. Unfortunately this faucet was in the front of the house and with our 2 lengths of hose, we could only reach part of the yard with it.
So all summer when we need to water (which is quite often given the fact that we've only had significant rain a few times this summer especially since the end of June), we have our 2yo stand by some 5-gallon buckets and hold the hose in them (gives him a good job) and we haul the buckets over next to the garden areas the hose doesn't reach and the rest of the kids and I take buckets and start filling and dumping from the 5-gallon buckets. I keep swapping buckets and we get done fairly fast, but it can be hard to get them all working well and takes more effort than I love to get it done. Yes, we could have bought another length of hose, but we're on a tight budget and I really didn't want to bug my dh for one.
Today when we were out on our deck I stepped on a spot of our deck by our house where there was a hinge on a board of the deck. I had noticed this hinge and board spot that was different but just thought it was their fix-up job for a broken board or something. When I stepped on it, the board came off the hinge and part of it fell in the hole. My daughter noticed that low and behold, there was another faucet back there for a hose!
So all this summer we've been hauling water back to the back garden when we really had water close enough to just use our hose! I know it will probably take a little longer to water by spraying the garden, but it's so much easier and the kids can take turn spraying the plants which they enjoy anyways. I'm so excited to water the garden now that it's a much easier job! I thank the Lord for this small blessing!
We've really loved having a garden this year. All in all it's going well. We've only had some sunflower tops eaten by deer so far. We're hoping keeping our dog outside on the deck near the garden will keep the deer away as more things are getting close to being picked and eaten! Here are some interesting pics I've taken around the yard / garden.
These small sunflowers were started from bird seed as a homeschool project in the winter! They're beautiful!
Here's a close-up of a flower with a bumblebee inside. They sure love these flowers! Note the pollen flecks on the bee if you can see them... Now the same bumblebee is on a different flower and the pollen is mostly cleaned off. It was interesting to watch the bee stop and clean itself with it's legs. In this pic, you can see one of the legs cleaning it's head
Baby beans popping out of the flowers. It's neat watching how this happens! More baby beans
Fascinating daylily that looks like a triple-stacked daylily! Don't know what happened or why it's like this! See blog below for comparison with a normal daylily!
Last summer a good friend of mine who knows quite a bit about nature was visiting the place we were renting at the tine. She noticed a wild strawberry plant growing there and showed it to my 8yo son. He is very good at remembering anything like this that he sees.
This year after we moved to our new house, he noticed a wild strawberry plant growing by our driveway. I wasn't sure if he was right but generally trust that he usually is right. We since have found a whole sprawling are in the way back part of our yard of these plants. We saw them awhile ago with their flowers and have been watching for berries.
Just yesterday we noticed the first berries that we could eat. The kids had a blast hunting through all the strawberries for little berries. They're pretty tiny and maybe not as flavorful, but the kids loved eating them! What a fun blessing for them! Here's a pic of a wild strawberry plant with a strawberry on it from our yard. Look closely and maybe there will be some of this around you!
We have lots of sprouting things now! It's so fun seeing things popping out. We only have a few things that haven't been sprouting - mainly our morning glories that were from someone else's seeds they saved from last year. I did soak them and nick them with fingernail clippers before planting. It's been almost 2 weeks. Maybe I'm just not patient enough... Our beans have been a bit slow but seem to be popping up here and there. I decided I would post some pics of the seedlings. It's always fun to remember what they looked like when they were tiny - especially next year when I'm trying to remember what broccoli really looked like as a seedling!
This is our back garden area. The tire on the left has basil in it. The teepees are for growing things up (pole beans, morning glories if they sprout etc...), and the other garden is for corn (mainly to feed to animals - possibly keep them away from other things in theory - plus it's fun to watch grow), pumpkins, zucchini and yellow squash. We also have our 2 mystery plants. They sprouted from last year's seeds in my mil's garden (she moved there last fall) and we're not sure what they are. Probably some kind of squash/pumpkin or melon. They all tend to look alike at first!
The other garden is right off our deck and we may fence it in - we'll see if we can find a cheap way to do it or not. Our lettuce is doing well that we started early and transplanted. We're eating that already. We also have a mini-sunflower that was part of some bird seed that we sprouted for a science experiment and decided to throw in the garden to see what how it would do. We can already see the yellow inside the top of the flower! We're also going to try planting our tomatoes next to our giant sunflowers to see if we can use the sunflower stem to stake the tomatoes to - tie parts of the tomatoes up on them.
Here's pics!
Basil
pole beans I think pole beans look really cool sprouting!
I thought I'd post our layout of our garden that I planted or am planting. It's a little hard to see as I did it in pencil. Hopefully I didn't do anything bad as far as what I planted next to each other! There are some walkways in the garden that aren't clearly labeled. They're all (except for the teepees) done in raised beds. I'm hoping that we get some good food from our garden! Our lettuce is doing really well and so far hasn't been found by any creatures. Anyways, I think I mentioned before, but if anyone has any recent garden plans or posts on their blogs, let me know and I'd love to visit your blog and see them! Just post me a comment on it!
Way up here in the North Country, we've made it to Memorial week-end which is considered "safe" for planting! We've been hard at work the last few weeks getting our garden put in. We have 2 different raised bed gardens dug up. We had a LOT of digging to get them ready! We also put up 2 teepees to plant pole beans and morning glories around and grow up the sides of. We already put some peas around them. We also got an old tractor tire given to us through freecycle and dug under it and filled it all in with good dirt. We'll plant something in there. I'll take pics soon and send!
We had 2 loads of compost/black dirt dumped in with us. Thankfully the farmer could drive his tractor around the back of our yard and dump the dirt in the garden so we didn't have to haul it long distances!
We still have yet to get our fencing up. Just this morning around 6:30 I looked out our front window and a dear was standing by our driveway just waiting for our garden no doubt! She just calmly walked up the road our our little town without much concern. I'm hoping that if I plant lots of everything, some things may be eaten some, but there will still be some left for us! We will try to fence the one garden, but the other one and the teepee would be too hard to do.
SOOO we'll see how much we plant this week-end and pray things get going and we get to eat some of what we plant! If anyone has recently put garden info or pics on their blogs, put your blog site in my comments. I'd love to read about other people's gardens!
Our yard we're in right now has no deciduous trees in it - really hardly any trees at all. There are lots of evergreen trees just outside our yard, but in our yard, pretty much nothing. My brother who lives an hour from us lives on 17 acres of woods with a wide variety of trees. We were over the yesterday for my nephew's birthday so I had my husband dig up a couple of trees to try to transplant. We took 2 maples and one either birch or poplar (hard to tell the difference when they're young and I haven't looked closely yet). I still need to get them in the ground as I'm waiting for the utilities to mark the yard so I know where I can dig. Anyways, I'm excited to get them in and hopefully get them growing if they survive the transplant.
We also are going to inherit a bunch of raspberries from my husband's sister who lives near her. Whenever we're in town we can get a bunch that they dug up and get them going! My kids will be very excited to have raspberries if we can keep the animals away from them enough to get some! We also have noticed wild strawberry plants growing all over around here - some in our yard and some in the vacant land around here. I'm hoping we can get some of those and the animals don't get all of those!
I'm excited to be able to do some gardening with my kids soon! We will be moving into our new home this coming week-end. A couple of weeks ago I finally got to see the place without snow and was happy to discover that there are 2 places that are already dug up for gardens. The first place is a raised bed garden that is very weed-overgrown. The second one is right off our deck and is a big square that has boards around it where they used to have an above-ground swimming pool. All we'll need to do is dig up the overgrown weeds and add good compost black dirt and get it all set up.
When we were there this week-end working on getting the place ready, our kids had a blast digging with their $3 metal kids shovels they got from Walmart. They were digging in the place where the swimming pool had been. There's quite a bit of sand there that had been brought in (our yard is mainly red clay). They had a blast digging in it and kept finding metal matchbox cars that were buried in the sand! That was a big help for us while we worked because it kept them well entertained! It was so neat seeing them all out there working.
I can't wait to get moved in and really be able to get working on the garden and all! I think the kids are going to have a blast with it all! Sometime later I'll post a bit of my garden plans as I get them all figured out! I love spring!
I'm very excited that if we move to this new house (see blog below), I could have a garden again this summer since we won't be renting anymore! Yeah! I would love to have a nice spot for garden stuff - to have fresh vegetables, sunflowers, have the kids learn about gardening, watch things grow! I loved the garden I had in my suburban yard. I love using trellis material for plants to grow up. Anyways, that is what I most want for the summer if we get a place of our own.
We're deciding now if we should make an offer. Most likely tomorrow we'll make an offer on this house. If it gets accepted, I can start garden planning! One question I have for people. What's the best way to keep deer and other creatures out of the garden? I presume I need a tall fence? Any other tips for keeping the produce from being devoured by anyone but us? Any tips for great soil? I'm not sure what type of soil is there at this point so I'll have to see come spring. Maybe some of you have great blogs on this and can give me a link! Thanks!
Now to see if we get an accepted offer and new home!
I was reading on pringlemom's "Which End Is Up" blog about their looking to set up a garden and she wanted opinions on Square Foot Gardening. I thought I'd share the garden we put in at our old house when we were living in a suburban yard. It worked REALLY well and we got great produce that summer!
I started by reading Cubed Foot Gardening by Christopher O Bird (good book other than his philosophy towards organic gardening etc...) along with Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. Cubed Foot Gardening is quite similar to Square Foot Gardening except that you do your raised beds in 12" high beds made out of lumber. Then you fill it with good dirt. Below you can see the picture of our beds that we made and the dirt we're filling it with. Having deep good dirt beds like that really help the plants and roots. It was sure convenient for weeding and upkeep and keeping the kids out of them! Our boxes were 4' x 8' boxes.
Christopher O Bird also talks a lot about planting things to grow up things. We had an old rusty swingset in our yard that was cemented into the ground and we used it as a framework for putting up trellis material for a playhouse/garden spot. You can see in the pics below what we did. We put trellis material across the front and across one side all the way to our back fence, then on the other side we put it partially to the back fence leaving an opening to get into the inside. So the kids could go into it to play and once the fast-growing things grew up, it could grow across the top on strings (although wire would have been sturdier). See pics below to understand it better.
The front of the trellis - morning glories, birdhouse gourds, and cucumbers were here The side that you can't see also had tomatoes that we tied to the trellis and pole beans
Inside the trellis garden
Showing Judah a bean
Picture showing the trellis better and the garden beds in early fall
I highly recommend the trellis idea in some form! It was so nice to use vertical space for some of those plants! It's so easy to dig and weed a trench that doesn't take up much space!
Anyways, that was the basics of our garden design! Hope that gives someone some good ideas!
These small sunflowers were started from bird seed as a homeschool project in the winter! They're beautiful!
Here's a close-up of a flower with a bumblebee inside. They sure love these flowers! Note the pollen flecks on the bee if you can see them...
Now the same bumblebee is on a different flower and the pollen is mostly cleaned off. It was interesting to watch the bee stop and clean itself with it's legs. In this pic, you can see one of the legs cleaning it's head
Baby beans popping out of the flowers. It's neat watching how this happens!
More baby beans
Fascinating daylily that looks like a triple-stacked daylily! Don't know what happened or why it's like this! See blog below for comparison with a normal daylily!
Basil
pole beans
I think pole beans look really cool sprouting!
peas
pumpkin
Mystery Plant - What is it???????????
our mini-sunflower and some lettuce
broccoli
lettuce
zucchini
Our Journey Into The Country - A Faith Walk