In my pretty garden...

The flowers are nodding

"How do you do?" they say

"How do you do today?"

In my pretty garden

The flowers are nodding.

I just love looking outside my kitchen window and seeing my garden grow.  When we first started we weren't really sure what we were doing.  We knew we both wanted and needed a garden.  But everything was so haphazard.  We started with some tomatoes, basil, and rosemary.  Built a quick and dirty box and stuck them in the NW corner of the backyard.  But then we decided to start expanding and realized a little too late that I wanted them someplace else...only I couldn't move them.  So we built some larger boxes and placed them on the SW portion of the lawn and filled those with lettuces and squash only to realize these things didn't grow too well in this area.  Then we watched the Back to Eden video and decided we needed to start over.  So we laid out long planting beds along the fence line and five long beds on the west side of the backyard.  We grabbed newspaper from the local recycle bins and made nice with a local stable for some composted manure and then built up the beds and began our plantings.

Swiss chard and the pine needle mulch we found on the side of the road

Beets and Carrots were planted last week and are just starting to come up

Broccoli

We moved the basil from the back corner.
It's been thriving here...almost as tall as Ada.

I'm saving the bottoms of my green onions and leeks that we buy
 at the store and replanting them...the onions are just about ready
for harvest...and the leek is coming along nicely, too.

We've bought fruit trees that have yet to be put in the ground...we keep arguing over where to put them and how to put them.  I want to espalier them against the west wall of my house.  It's a completely blank space with only one tiny window.  Matt wants to do more dense planting where you put three trees in a triangle where they are each 18 inches apart.  All three will grow in the space of one tree which helps keep their size controlled and works well for pollination.  Both are space-saving techniques...but I really want to espalier