Garden is planted! - my urban garden

Firstly, I guess I should say something about the "blogging-hiatus" I've been on lately.  It's been a while since I've posted, and I've been unemployed the whole time.  So really, you'd think I'd have tons of time for this, but I just haven't been indoors very much.  The yard has been the obvious victim of years of neglect by the previous owners, so I've been working hard to bring it into some kind of control with large amounts of weeding and chopping and rototilling and the general moving of dirt.  Things are finally coming together so I have a little time to take a break and say a bit about how it's all going.

So, the indoor starters had an accident.  As many of my Facebook associates are already aware, I had a moment of gardening stupidity and accidentally irradiated the baby plants on my back step after forgetting them outside for an entire afternoon on a very hot day.  So there wasn't much left that could be salvaged, pretty much just the marigolds made it through.  Lesson learned, but at a high price. 

Returning then to the garden.  Originally, the plan was to rototill the far corner of the yard, which in a previous life had once been a sandbox.  This has been both a boon and a problem.  It's all very nicely churned up for planting, but with being so incredibly sandy nothing can go in this year.  The plan is to compost on the sandy area, so that next year it will have a bit more soil to work with.  In what soil there is, I've planted the very large crops - the pumpkin, zucchini and cucumber - so that they can eventually sprawl over the sandy part as they grow. In the meantime, I wasn't going to totally take the year off with the main garden, and staked out a smaller bed next to the house as the home for this year's garden. 

The plans!

It's not a huge space but really quite manageable, especially seeing as this is the first year for the DH and I to be gardening without the direct supervision of someone who has done this before.  The only change I made to the diagram is I swapped the spinach and carrots around because I wanted a longer row of carrots.

All planted!

You can't see it in the photo, but the peas will grow right against the step, and will eventually have a cage or trellis to lean on.  I left that rather large gap down the centre so that I can navigate my way to the back without crushing anything.  It's hard to see them in the shade, but on the right there are pepper, jalapeno, strawberry and basil plants that I bought at a local greenhouse.  The day lily at the back used to be WAY bigger than it is now, we got it down to a more reasonable size, but couldn't extract the whole thing without killing it. 

So we will see what develops.  I'm a bit concerned with the soil's hardness, but hopefully that won't impede things too much.

More posts will be soon to come, I promise I won't leave it so long this time!

Cheers.