In Which We Garden

One of the things Twin and I were most looking forward to when we bought our house almost three years ago was the gardening we'd be able to do.
Twin always has a few guinea pigs running around (not counting the multitude of foster pigs we take in for the shelter) so fresh veggies was something we thought would be fun to grow. Anything we didn't eat could go to the pigs and, to a lesser extent, the dogs

Last year the garden went really well. We had far far more Roma tomatoes than we could ever use and cooked up our peas in a stir fry.
Normally I don't like carrots but the ones we pulled out tasted so good I felt bad about saying mean things about carrots in the past.

This year we wanted to make the veggie garden bigger so we could plant a larger variety of veggies.

Here's the before pic of the veggie garden, along with the kale that survived the MN winter.





The kale actually did so well it went out to seed, sending up pretty yellow flowers that reached over four feet in height before we had to take it out. The dogs enjoyed playing with the stalks.

Here's the new garden.




We replaced the wood borders (which we had originally recycled from our flower garden) and added bricks. We also made it twice as long.

Here's a breakdown of what's planted:

on the left we have asparagus, which is a two year crop so no harvesting until next fall. Then we have spinach and scallions. Beans begin right where the netting starts and runs into the next picture and the two seedlings are grape and Roma tomatoes.



Here we have the beans along the fence until the netting is bunched on the bricks. That's where the peas start. In front we have a golden bell pepper and a lilac bell pepper



The peas continue until the A frame where cucumber and zucchini are planted (the A frame is awesome. The plant will grow up the netting and the veggies will hang down, preventing them from yellowing or molding on the ground)
The seedling on the left is cantaloupe and we also have lettuce and carrots planted in the front under the A frame.

We will be planting red potatoes but the cut seed potatoes need a few more days to dry and callus before planting.

Also Twin and our mom want to plant some giant pumpkin seeds to try and grow a massive pumpkin, something a cousin of ours is really into. I'm not really against the idea, per se, I just worry that if we get a massive, state fair worthy pumpkin, it won't be as fun to deal with or move as they think.

We planted herbs in containers:


From the top, clockwise, rosemary, thyme, parsley and basil. We use these a lot in cooking. Except basil. We rarely use that (except on margherita pizza) but just really like the smell.

We lost a few houseplants over the winter (a few are still struggling) so I got a 3 more when we went to Ikea for a new bookshelf.




Also I planted the wildflower seeds I got from Summer from her contest.



I was really excited about these but that night something (most likely a squirrel) for whatever reason dug a huge hole in the dirt so I'm not sure how many will end up growing. sadface.

Then we moved onto trying to zazz up our main flower garden.



For some reason whoever planted this garden was crazy. As you can see from the front picture it looks OK, well filled out (the top tier hasn't been weeded yet). But the whole back side of the garden is empty. Nothing planted at all.

So last year we added some mat plants to try and fill it up a bit and this year we're going to try and give it some symmetry. I'm sure we'll need to add some more plants next year as well. Some day the garden will be filled with perennials and then we can add some mulch to make it look even prettier.

Mostly we added some lilies to even it out (which twin really likes) and some purple flowers (of which I can't remember the name right now) which I fancy. We're planning on hopefully adding a few more lilies this year (it was really windy when I took these pictures...)






After all of that we bought a few vine and creeper plants to grow along our fence.

Here's a clematis we got that has already bloomed along with a trumpet creeper.






We also planted a new lilac. We had planted 4 last year but one of them didn't make it through the winter.



And by "didn't make it through the winter" I mean "didn't make it through a certain someone who has a fondness for sticks and stick like bushes".