2020 has been a hell of a year. Hans' job moved him to full time work-from-home and I've bounced between 25-50% WFH. Back when we thought the breakdown of society was eminent I asked Hans to help me get a vegetable garden area started. I had a lot more time at home during the summer. After saving up for a necessary home repair we had a patio put in. After that the last missing piece was replacing the rest of our yard with actual grass. I was thankful when Hans suggested that we not mess around with seeding this time and instead buy some sod. At the end of August I started calling around to local plant nurseries for prices. After borrowing a rototiller and wheel barrow from a friend, we obtained all of our supplies at got to work!
Hans helped me put together a simple fence made from
wooden garden stakes and chicken wire.
Before I put flowers in the tall planter boxes we had a small spring crop of
radishes, lettuce, arugula, and peas.
If you squint, the "grass" doesn't look too bad. There were several holes leftover from the old deck so I had to move some dirt around and fix the ankle busters.
The junky ground around the new deck from last year was really sad to look at.
Veggies coming along! Once the tomatoes finally sprouted I had to thin them out severely.
Shortly after this photo was taken our patio was put in.
See previous blog post!
Once summer came to an end I cleared away the spent vegetable plants and replaced them with some perennials and annuals from the same place that did our patio.
Since we were about to rototill the rest of the yard we used the time while we were waiting for the weeds to die off to make a small paver pad for the shed and waste cans. This was much harder to do than we anticipated and it made use very glad that we paid someone else to do the patio. After framing out the area with boards we laid stock hardware store pavers and swept sand into the crevices. It didn't have to be perfect because the whole thing was going to be covered later. We also replaced some broken fence boards.
Looking good!
Bye-bye, weeds and cruddy lawn!
While Hans did the much tougher work of running the rototiller I rented a pick-up truck, went to the nursery to get some good top soil, walked it around the house by wheel-barrow (thank GOODNESS we had one to use), and went back for the sod.
Look at that! The first picture is from the day we put down sod
and the second picture is about a week later.
It looks seriously nice now. And mowing is so much easier!
I'm looking forward to enjoying it all summer next year.
I gotta invest in a bocce set.
All ready for next year's garden!
Can you see the small compost pile? Oh, do I have plans...