Quick recap…Here is our front yard when we bought the house

When we purchased the house a few years ago there were little garden beds in the front of the house.

It’s not the prettiest view, but you can see the trees that run along the fence.  They basically prevented anything from growing.  We waited it out a season to see if the trees provided some benefit such as shade in the summer, but they didn’t, so down went the trees!

  It was incredible how much more light there was in the yard.  Everything just brightened right up!

The planter beds were a bit of a failure last year.  With the large branches hanging over they didn’t get a lot of sun and I doubt the soil had any nutrients.  All the vegetables that I planted last year grew to be about 6 inches and then just stopped growing.  Whenever I’d take walks around the neighborhood I would just stop and stare at my neighbors vegetable gardens with envy.  At that point I decided, this was my year for a vegetable garden!

The little garden beds weren’t sufficient for very many vegetables, so it was time to build a monster garden!

10 by 5 feet didn’t seem like a big bed…until we put it together.  I was afraid it was going to be a little more than I could handle.

We put the bed in position to create the border.  We lined the edge with pavers that continued about 2 inches under the vertical boards, with a weed barrier to prevent grass from growing up through the garden.  The major plus is that this allows us to mow right over the pavers and keep from getting those hard to mow grass blades that grew up against our last vegetable bed.

One edge has 16×16 inch pavers.  My goal is to build a second bed on the opposite side leaving these as a little pathway between.  The original plan was to build two at once, but after building the first bed I decided the second could wait until next season

I wrapped plastic paint tarp around the inside of the bed and stapled it down to keep any of the treated lumber from seeping into the veggies.  It was a hard decision, the untreated wood wouldn’t have held up as well.  After spending about 20 minutes pacing up and down the lumber aisles and calling my dad for advice, I finally decided on treated lumber with a barrier.

This is the start of my garden.  I was able to transplant the strawberries and they were pretty successful!

We lost a few pavers, meaning they fell and broke, so I used them to create a little wall to contain the strawberries.

I had been growing seedlings in the garage for months so they were all ready to be planted.

{Corn and Zucchini}

{Sunflowers, pumpkin, Corn and Strawberries}

And as of Thursday August 4th, this is what it has become!

We have strawberries, snap peas, green beans, tomatoes, pumpkins, zuchini,  walla walla onions, and corn!  Unfortunately because of this silly summer, they haven’t gotten quite as far as I had have hoped, I’ve only been able to eat the peas and 1 tomato…but I’m being patient!

And I should just mention – we CAN mow over the pavers and make a nice clean edge, but that doesn’t mean that we actually have been mowing…the sun just finally came out here so we have to take advantage!  And do other things : )

And just in case you were wondering how the star magnolia went…I am proud to announce that we got it in the ground and after 4 days it still looks like it is doing pretty well!