Edibles – A Progress Report

As a more optimistic and happier feeling gardening post than my last, I thought I’d show the progress we’ve made in creating our garden.  My last post was much more blue than it should have been, but I was feeling overwhelmed by everything. Somehow when I look at things in smaller bites as I’ll show here, it makes me appreciate that there has been definite progress in the three years of growing seasons we’ve had in the house.

When we started, as I said earlier, Katy and I had decided we wanted a primarily edible garden. Not that it couldn’t be pretty, but most of the plants were going to be edible in some way. Our tribute to economy and green living.

Here is what we started with (May 2011):

One yew is already chopped down almost to the ground, and the raggedy boxwood is enclosing a large number of weedy greens and is surrounded by something like a bluebell.  Just so you know, Katy absolutely hated the boxwood. See what happens to it.

Several hours later, the second yew is down to sticks and the boxwood hedge has been hacked to pieces.  It kind of looks like a site-specific tornado touched down.  This is only surface destruction however. It took many further hours by yours truly to remove the roots of that hedge.

Sweaty, sticky and cranky hours. Over several days. Actually, it became kind of therapeutic. I would come home from work and any ragy energy was worked off productively by eliminating boxwood roots.

Leap of time – nothing planted for a year. Note the date. It took a really long time for the removal of the boxwood roots – or as much of them as I could rip out. They’re really hardy buggers.

June 2012 – Now weeded several times it actually has plants in it!  Real plants that we put in the ground intentionally! So now we have some herbs (tarragon, sage, lavender) and some sunflowers.

Still not the garden we envisioned, so we marched on, after we took a trip to Calgary for a week. Seen above, there are a number of weeds amongst our desired plantings.  So on went the weed cloth and mulch!  Much prettier, except I miscalculated the amount of mulch required to cover the fairly small bed. We covered up the missing bits with rocks I had gathered from various excursions to the beach and river (and some found in the garden during the overhaul).

Fully mulched but not edged. That comes much later because I didn’t like the black plastic edging and couldn’t then and still can’t, afford the wrought iron fanciness.  Note the artful distribution of the rocks. That would be Katy’s work, along with the actual locating and planting of all the greens.  My contribution was the Toronto Maple Leafs Gnome standing watch in the background.

Everything looks pretty good. Now look at our babies!

So not everything is doom and gloom. Although everything could use a good trimming, we’re just so happy to see everything thriving, we’re letting them flower because they’re pretty!