This blog now has 200 posts! I thought I'd
do a bit of an overview of how things have been going since I first started this blog.
Most significantly, when I first started this blog, I was unemployed and living in a rented house with my boyfriend. Since then I've found a job, we've gotten married, and bought a house. I don't post nearly as often as I did when I was unemployed and had a lot of time on my hands, but I still try to at least do my garden updates every full moon.
Since we moved into our house, we've done a lot of work on it, but there are still a lot of projects on our to-do list.
Here is the garden in the front. This used to be a patch of mostly dead-looking Bermuda grass that the previous inhabitants parked cars on. Now it has four 4'x20' raised beds made of cedar on it. In the future I'd like to make pathways between them with landscape fabric and cedar bark mulch, and put a small fence around it to keep out the deer and chickens. Right now I have cylinders of wire around a lot of the plants to protect them from getting dug up and eaten, but I'd like a more permanent solution. Still, I think this is a big improvement over what this patch used to look like.
This is mostly my husband's project. In addition to our personal vehicles, he has a work truck, so he built an extension to our driveway with crushed granite, and in between he made this xeric garden. The cenizo was already there, so he built the garden around it with more crushed granite and lined with limestone. Right now it has two prickly pears, an agave, and some Indian blanket. We'd like to add more wildflowers and some type of round or cylindrical cactus, and maybe some kind of yuccas. Except there might not be enough room for that, so now we're looking at the other side of the front yard.
This flowerbed on the other side of the driveway came with the house, but it's not in very good shape. It goes from the driveway all around to the side of the house, and it's made of landscape timbers that are pretty rotten. A lot of the soil is washed out of it, and it's full of weeds. I planted the irises and cannas my mother-in-law gave me here, and there is a dwarf yaupon and boxwood that were there when we moved in. There are also several lantanas, but everything else in there are undesirable weeds. What we've decided to do is make this match the xeric garden on the other side of the driveway. We'll remove the rotten timbers are replace them with more limestone rocks. My husband actually wants to expand it a bit so it comes out further from the house, and that's good because it will reduce how much lawn we have even more. The main difference between this area and the xeric garden along the driveway is this side is much shadier from the big oak trees, so we'll have to put in more shade-tolerant plants. That might be a good thing, though. Limestone and crushed granite can make it match the garden on the other side of the driveway, but having it transition into different species of plants will make it more interesting.
We also discovered something nice when we put the crushed granite in on the other side. The color of crushed granite matches the color of the bricks of our house, so that looks even better than we thought it would.
My husband wanted to plant a hedge along the front of the front yard to provide more privacy. The big oak trees make a nice canopy near the house, but there wasn't really any understory. He planted a few native shrubs right under the oak trees, like yaupon and evergreen sumac, but out here which is not directly under the oak trees, I wanted fruit trees. In the foreground of the above picture is a fig, then after that is a loquat.
Then beyond the loquat we have a kumquat, Satsuma, Myer lemon, and pomegranate.
Right now they look very unnatural, with cages around them to protect them from deer, and lined up so regularly. I hope that once they grow bigger they start to look more interesting. All these different species get to different sizes and shapes, with the fig and loquat getting pretty large (which is why we put them on the end) and the citruses staying short and shrubby. Eventually we'll take the cages off when they're bigger and not as vulnerable to deer munching on them or rubbing their bark off.
We used to have a key lime out here too, but last winter really hurt it bad, even though we covered all the citrus with frost blankets. Most of its branches got killed, and we thought it was a goner, until it sprouted back from the stump. So we dug it up and put it back in a pot, and replaced it with the kumquat. I guess key limes are not quite cold hardy enough to plant in the ground here.
Here is one of the rain barrels we had at our previous residence (with the potted key lime to the right). Another thing on our to-do list is getting some big water tanks. This little rain barrels are nice but just not enough. In a heavy downpour they overflow in only minutes, and in the middle of summer when it's really dry, we use them up quickly. Now we have room for a couple of really big tanks that hold hundreds of gallons. We'd need to first put rain gutters on our roof (weirdly, our house didn't already have them), and then we think we have room for one tank on each side of the house. We can keep the rain barrels and attach them to our garden shed or something like that.
I think it would be great to hook up the soaker hoses for the vegetable gardens up to the big rainwater tanks. I wonder if I might be able to do all the watering for the vegetables from the rainwater tanks once they are full. That would sure be nice.
After that, I also want to set up some kind of greywater system. My husband says it wouldn't be too hard to divert the washing machine and shower drains outside to water plants.
Along the side of our house we have a patio that cuts into the hillside a little bit, and is lined with bricks to form a bit of a ledge. When we first moved in, there was nothing growing there except for two esparanzas and two rose bushes. I thought this was a perfect place for an herb garden, so that the patio would be lined with fragrant herbs. Plus it's right by the back door which opens straight into the kitchen.
The right side is a little shady, so here I planted things like mint, catnip, and lemon balm. My husband planted some yarrow, and has been decorating it with interesting rocks and fossils he's collected over the years.
The left side is sunnier, so here's where I have things like rosemary, oregano, thyme, marjoram, sage, etc. Also right now I have basil flourishing in the heat, and parsley going to seed.
Then right along the house I planted some of the more tender herbs so they can be better protected: bay, lemongrass, and pineapple sage. I really should have put the lemon verbena and Mexican mint marigold here too, so I might move them over. My husband put some extra crushed granite here, but I think that actually makes them too hot. My plan is to mulch the herbs with cedar bark eventually, and I think I'll put some bark over here too. When the afternoon sun is hitting this area directly, the pineapple sage gets badly wilted.
Speaking of my husband, this is a project he's been working on. This big hole will eventually be a water garden. It's directly behind the house, and used to be just an open grassy area. Since then my husband has been digging away at it,
by hand. He used a shovel for about a foot down until he hit bedrock, and from then on has been using a rock bar. This weekend he finally rented a jackhammer to finish it up. It will eventually have a waterfall, and water plants in it. We thought about putting fish in, but after we read up on it more, it sounds like a lot of trouble. Now we're leaning towards just letting frogs and toads colonize it. We're also looking into powering the waterfall's pump with a solar panel to make it more eco-friendly.
Here is the compost pile in the back that needs some work. Right now it's built of cinderblocks we already had in the yard, and those got full so I had to start piling new stuff beside it. I planted my extra sweet potato plants in it as an experiment. I'd like to make it more permanent and expand it so it has at least two sections, since one is turning out not to be enough.
And finally in the very back corner of the back yard is the other vegetable garden. It's looking a bit messy and neglected, but it does have pole beans, squash, cucumbers, and melons planted in it. I've been putting more effort getting the garden in the front looking nice. The back garden is right next to the old garden shed (which I should have included in the photo, now that I think of it) that came with the house. We'd like to replace it some day, because it's rotting and falling apart. After that I'll probably redo this back garden to make it neater and tidier, maybe putting in some permanent beds and pathways like the front garden is going to have. Removing the old shed will also give us more room. It's taking up some of the sunny area back here, so we're going to put our new shed in the shade, to leave us more room in the sun to plant edibles.
So that's the work we've done so far in the two years we've been living in this house, and what we still have on our to-do list. But we're both very happy to have a big yard like this we can do so many things with. I always wanted a really big vegetable garden and fruit trees, and my husband always wanted a garden pond, so now we can have them.
