Garden and Yard Project

The home we bought had no landscape going on in the back yard. None! It is an open canvas for planning and planting. Good and bad for us. Bad cause we have to do all the work of planning and the cost of planting. Good for us cause we can make it our way. Which I am liking more even with the cost of the plants. So we have decided to plant most of the items in our yard edible. Some of the plants we brought with us and aren't edible but they were ours already so that's fine. We're just going for the majority of the plants to be edible, not all. It has been fun planning things out and planting. With the pictures I'll walk y'all threw what we have as of now, March 20, 2017.

Okay, to start we put in a square foot garden. And went from there. Lets go.....

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POSTING.

A tree growing fruit is located on the side of the house near the back yard on the outside of the fence. I did some research and found that the fruit is called a Japanese Plum from the loquat tree. Some mistake it for a kumquat. I was one of them. But after doing my research I found that a kumquat is from the citrus family and they look more like citrus. This loquat fruit do not. It is from the rose family (rosaceae). Some say it's like a cross between a peach and mango. I think that's a good fit to describe the fruit. So bonus for us that is was already here! And a mature tree already bearing fruit!

Okay, on with what we have added to the yard. Hubby got me some wood pallets from work. These can be found anywhere for free tho. I usually see them on the side of the road for garbage. Get some and make your garden! 

Anywho, we broke down the pallet and without cutting the wood you can make a 4' by 4' square garden box. Like the picture below on the right. Just nail them together.

 Or you can cut one piece of wood in half to make a 2' by 4' garden bed, like the garden box in pictures below. You'll understand after reading the book about square foot gardening. But the basic is your beds are no larger than 4' by 4' but you can go down from there to make designs. I used graph paper to plan our garden out.

For our garden I made 6 garden beds 2' by 4' and 1 garden bed 4' by 4' then placed them where we decided to put the garden and in the design that we liked. We used 3 pallets to make our entire garden! Inside each box I removed all the weeds and grass. This part really sucked....lol. But was worth it. Now instead of pulling everything up like I did you could just lay down a weed guard.

Now I did some research in our area and found that the county gives away free mulch. As we went to get some we noticed they also have a building next door that sells mulch and soil. Unfortunately when we went there they were out of the free mulch. So we went to the building next door to see about the soil. Wow what great prices. I won't ever get soil at a store again. And because their prices were so good we went ahead a bought some mulch. We ended up buying a compost soil and garden soil along with undyed mulch. I didn't buy the amount of soil it would of taken to fill each garden box to the top! Heck no. I just divided what we bought evenly between all the boxes and figured the roots can also go into the regular yard soil. After words I attached string to the box to make the square foot sections I will be planting in. Again, you will have to refer to the book to understand this or research on line about square foot gardening. I prefer the book cause I always have it on hand.

Okay, after that was finished I planted the seeds. I chose seeds as they are way less expensive than a starter plant. And I'm one to try to save as much as possible! Of course some had to be purchased as a root. Like the asparagus, it comes in root form in a bag. After the seeds were planted I mulched lightly over all the beds. I think it came out super nice!

I'll take this time to explain those planters in the garden just in case anyone is curious. The blue one is a blueberry bush. I thought it would be nice in a container as it is a bush and not a vine. The yellow one is potatoes. You start with a few inches of soil, add the cut up potato, cover it with some soil and you keep adding soil covering the leaves as it grows. The last planter is carrots. Seeds planted directly in the soil. The purpose for putting my potatoes and carrots (root vegetables) in containers is for easy harvest. Once they are ready to be harvested I will just dump the container in the wheel barrel and remove all the veggies. Then add the soil back in the container. Easy-peasy when it comes to harvesting root veggies, I think. Do all root veggies this way and you won't have to dig them out!

Before the soil laying hubby decided to buy me a garden wheel barrel. Moving soil and mulch around the large yard by hand wouldn't be fun. I am thankful for the wheel barrel too. Was very much needed and is used for more than just garden soil and mulch!

 Searching on Craigslist I came across someone selling edible plants, Moringa trees and papaya. The price was unbeatable so I made arrangements to go buy some. On a Saturday hubby and I went and he was selling the moringas for $10 each. I was just going to buy one but he was having a "sale" - buy 2 moringa trees and get a papaya for free. I noticed that some papaya pots had more than one plant. So I took the sale and for $20 I got 5 plants!! 2 moringa and 3 papaya, can't beat that.

 With the larger wood from the pallets hubby made me small frames to place around my baby trees! Below I planted one papaya (middle, in corner) and both moringas. I put the other papaya in other places of the yard. Now, the moringa leaves are edible. Very healthy tree. They also grow very fast so getting a baby tree isn't a problem if you are thinking of the wait before being able to eat them. They say it grows in about 8 months. For the cost of only $10 I'll wait 8 months! I've also been told papaya leaves boiled into a tea is know to cure cancer. I haven't done my research on that yet, just something I've been told. So might be a wonderful tree to have along with the moringa.

 Above - Moringa tree

Below - Papaya tree

Now along with my edible trees I wanted banana! I had a banana tree where we use to live and didn't take it with me. Made me sad but again as I was looking on Craigslist I found them for sale for as little as $15. BUT I ended up getting them for $10 at Lowe's! Again, I noticed there were some pots growing more that one plant! So I ended up picking two banana trees out and getting a total of 7 for $20! Damn, just can't beat these deals I keep running into! These banana trees are dwarfs tho. Which means they won't grow taller than 10' which I think is awesome.

I am loving the variegated leaves!!

So that leads us to composting.

As I need to feed all the edible plants...well any of the plants....in our yard, I have decided to compost our kitchen scraps. We took 3 old privacy fence pieces we found along with a little white picket fence to make our composing area. You can see in the picture where we used 2 of the private fence pieces and the little white picket fence. The third private fence piece we took apart and made a smaller fence for the other side of the compost and a gate. So a free composting area! The gate opens wide for the wheel barrel to fit! Very happy with this project.

 I know this post is long, but I did put a warning...lol

Almost done.

All this above was a project for many, many weeks and the final step of all of it was the planting of the seeds in the garden beds. Which was about 12 days ago from today. Today, March 20 the garden looks like this....... 

Green beans

Potatoes

 Corn

 Lettuce

 Spinach

 Zucchini

There are tomatoes, bell peppers, carrots and peas also in the garden. For some reason I didn't get a picture of the carrots and peas. The tomatoes and bell peppers just haven't started to grow yet. I hope they will and that no all the seeds to those plants were duds. Fingers crossed! But so far everything is doing really good!

Happy Gardening!