A Little Personal Growth

Inspired by my friends Michelle and Andrew, I decided to try a little veggie garden this year. We had a spot in the backyard where the grass was a mess so Bob tilled it up for me. This is what it looked like:

We decided it needed some kind of border to keep the lawn mover crews from making a mess of it so we got a pallet of round river stone and made a simple english garden border for it. We divided it into three sections for this year, but those little walls will probably come out as my planting skills come back to life. The top bed is for the magnolia, the center for veggies, and the bottom right bed is for flowers. We added two decorative planters at the gate and some stepping stones and gravel under the gate itself. That whole area was a mud pit. Here's what it looked like yesterday:

I'd also be very remiss if I didn't point out the large cleared section directly behind the fence. Bob literally spend HOURS clearing the brush out of that area, including a few random small trees. It was totally overgrown, ugly, and full of ticks. We're still trying to figure out what we'll do there. Technically, its common area and we're not supposed to mess with it at all, but I'd liked to plant a lilac hedge or maybe a few evergreens for coverage. In the winter, those woods become pretty bare. That's a fall project. Yesterday, too, we harvested our first vegetable. Here it is, still on the vine:

And here's the little farmer with his bounty:

I cooked that beautiful yellow gift up for dinner along with some delicious green beans that Connor harvested at Great Country Farms yesterday on his summer camp field trip. They were both delicious. Its funny how you forget how fresh vegetables taste because we get so used to them from the grocery store. We've also got canteloupe, zucchini, tomatoes, and yellow bell peppers out there. And about two weeks ago I made a second attempt at starting some of those giant pumpkins for fall harvest. The first shot at growing those was a dismal disaster. The squirrels or the birds ate them up. But this time I have five of them nicely sprouting.