The Garden 2012

Every year we do a little bit more to our garden/yard. 

Last year we built some vegetable beds. 

This is what we've done so far this year:

Started seeds indoors.  Broccoli, cabbage, and brussel sprouts.  I'm not sure if I started them in time considering the warm weather we're having, but we shall see.

I painted the fence.  It used to be a 6-foot wooden fence, but over time it became a sort of retaining wall for the path behind it.  We cut down the upper part to let in some sunshine, but had to keep the part that held back the rocks and dirt. It's not the prettiest thing ever.  We don't have the time to replace it entirely, so I just painted it to add some color to the garden.

I added this trellis to the vegetable bed my sister and I built last year. 

This is what it looked like before:

Much better, I think.

Our garden could definitely be categorized as the "Reuse" in the reduce, reuse, recycle slogan.  We use old fencing, old siding, old pallets, rocks, and even old tires (will be a potato tower eventually and I think I'm going to paint them blue, too).  But it's all actually done very orderly and ends up looking nice, even if the photo above doesn't really show it. 

So far this year we've cut back some of the unwanted bushes, built a fence around the entire garden, put in some rock steps (photo above, to the right) to walk on, raked the leaves out of the entire garden, started building a new vegetable bed, re-vamped the wooden borders to some of the flower beds, and made a new compost bin (photo below).

Here's my new compost bin.  We've got several around the place, but I don't have one close by the house that's convenient for me to use.  This one is.

My daffodils against the blue fence with the morning sunshine on them.

And again.  I love my blue fence.  It makes me feel quirky.  Only quirky people paint their raggedy old half-fence blue, right?

My Bradford pear tree blooming.