In the Little Yellow House: Gardens In Progress

We’re moving right along with our backyard work, over the weekend we had sunshine and mild temperatures. We redid the deer netting fence surrounding the vegetable garden and blew out most the leaves. I also finally had a chance to plant my spring seeds - lettuce, swiss chard and snap peas. Spring is so late this year, it’s been too cold for my spinach to even come up yet.

We also did some weeding and a lot of mulching. There’s a lot to mulch in our yard. You can see all the different beds in the layout drawing I shared last week. It takes awhile to get it all done! We started with the front yard (a priority since everyone can see it) and then moved to the back. Spring is so late this year, most of our plants are barely peeking through the dirt - as of Sunday our yellow forsythia hadn’t even popped yet! (I didn't even bother to photograph the front yard - it's still all wintry and ugly until the plants come back.)

This is the blackberry, raspberry, sweet pea bed. Last year I had high hopes of letting it grow wild over the trellises for that romantic rustic English cottage garden look. Except apparently the beautiful “wild untamed” look takes work. It’s a lot like carefully styled hair that really took an hour to do but pretends to be that “just rolled out of bed” look. In reality my untamed bed became a giant messy bramble last summer, it wasn’t pretty. So this year I am going to keep it in check. I trimmed back and tied up the raspberries to control their prickly sprawl. I’m going to trim back the sweet peas as needed.

Before

In progress

After

The rocks you see there are an idea I had to keep the mulch from washing down the driveway. If we decide to keep it and extend it, I'm going to need a lot more rocks.

As I mentioned in my plan last week, over the weekend we extended this bed down the whole sliver of grass between the driveway and the fence so we don’t have to mow it. It’s really awkward and I think it will look better mulched with a few plantings/flowers instead of sickly grass. I smothered the remaining grass with several layers of newspaper and cardboard and then covered it with mulch. Thick newspaper or a layer cardboard is great at preventing weeds. It looks so much better all cleaned up (and all the trash is gone too - hooray!).