Another First

In my last post, I talked about a summer first...Curt and I had a garage sale.

Well, this post is about another summer first...I've planted a small vegetable garden.  To my family, stop laughing!

I think it was about three years ago when Curt created the space for a vegetable garden.  He found some railroad ties on Kijiji, and they were sitting in the backyard waiting for a purpose.  So, we used those to create the border of our garden, and then filled it with a load (or two) of topsoil.  The year we did all that, it was too late to plant veggies, so we just put some extra plants in there with plans to transplant them the following season. 

Unfortunately, we made it too big and the topsoil we put in wasn't great...and, the plants that we put in there were randomly placed and hard to identify the next season.  So, we kinda ignored the garden and it ended up looking like this...

(please don't judge, it's in the backyard, no one really sees it)...

This picture is actually from May 2010 (I thought I had a more current picture, but can't find it)...so, it wasn't that bad last year, but it was still very much a work in progress!

So, early this season I decided that this was the year to get the garden back in control!  I knew that in order to achieve that goal, I had to practically start fresh...so, I got rid of almost everything in there, including the plants!  I transplanted a few things, but some stuff ended up in the compost pile with the weeds - random ground cover plants that we don't have a place for, and a few annuals that weren't doing all that well.

Once that was done, we borrowed a rototiller and put it to work.

And finally, I was ready to plant.

This is what it looked like by Sunday evening...

That's just half the garden, the other half is still mostly bare.  There are a few hostas and another plant (some type of iris, maybe) that was too big/healthy to pull out.

So, at this point, I felt like the size of the garden was still going to be a problem - I would have to walk through the dirt to get to the plants in the middle.

Solution, buy a few limestone patio stones to create a little walkway...

Ooops, the bottom left corner of the garden is still full of weeds ;)  I guess I'm so pleased with the rest of the garden, I don't even see those!

And now, a few 'portraits'...

 

 Cucumbers, peas and beef steak tomatoes.  I also planted green peppers and cherry tomatoes.

Those 'garden stakes' labeling each plant, an idea from Pinterest.  I went to a few stores and asked for stir sticks in the paint department...harder than it sounds; the person at the first store would only give me ONE, and the guy at the second store, told me he wasn't supposed to give them away, and then winked at me as he handed me TWO?!?!  ha!

So, now we'll have to see if I can keep up with the weeding and watering...and whether or not these plants actually yield any vegetables!