2011 Garden

"Garden" is one of the words in the description of this blog, but I have posted almost nothing about our garden this year. It's not for lack of garden work being done, although most of the work has not been done by me. Dean started plotting and planning the garden back in the fall. Since then, he has dug up a yard full of grass and stones, designed and laid a stone pathway, built brick and wooden beds for plants, built trellises for peas and beans, started seeds of all kinds, ordered and planted flowers, given tender loving care to seedlings, arranged approximately 500 soaker hoses and made approximately 10,000 trips to Lowes and Ace Hardware.

This weekend, he planted the last of the seeds of the season, corn, beans and squash: "the garden is officially planted."

Our little Denver yards have been turned into an impressive city garden, if I do say so myself. In the backyard, we have peas, radishes, beets, strawberries, blueberries, asparagus, and lots of flowers. In the front, we have broccoli, corn, tomatoes, peppers, squash and corn, plus some flowers and cactuses (cacti?) on the porch.

Here is a little walking tour of our garden, with "before" pictures from April and "after" pictures from today.



Here are the baby peas in April:



and here is a picture of the newly-planted flowers and peas from today. It's safe to say that the peas have grown.



On the other side of the path from the flowers are the strawberries. Here they are in April (they have grown and overcome a strange outbreak of brown spots but still look pretty much the same):



Against the fence and beside the strawberries are blueberries and asparagus. No pictures of those today, as both still are very small.

Moving to the front yard, here are the baby broccolis, right after they were moved to pots:



and here are the front beds in April, just after they were built:



Now here is the front yard today:



You can see how much the broccolis have grown. In the front beds are peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, and corn.

Here is a view of the other side of the yard from the sidewalk. As Dean said, our yard looks weird. The teepees are for beans to grow up, and the metal trellis is for cucumbers. Behind the beans and cucumbers will be squash.



Finally, here is something very cool:



my hanging cactus flowered!

Now, fingers crossed against wilts, droughts, bugs, and mysterious plant diseases of all kinds.