Vegetable Garden Planning

I hope everyone had a nice relaxing weekend or a productive DIY weekend! Our weekend was filled with pulling weeds in our garden beds and starting our our vegetable garden plans. I just started using Preen Garden and Weed Preventer plus plant food, so I'm hoping this cuts down on the amount of weeds we get, its amazing how pesky weeds are even with so called 'weed barrier' down. On Friday I shared the current state of our backyard and I'm so happy with the progress and super excited to finally get started on our vegetable garden.  

Now that we have a large grassy lawn in our backyard, we decided the best location our our vegetable garden would be the large empty space we have directly in front our patio. The area we mapped out for our garden is 8ft wide and 24ft long, which is gives us plenty of room for one or two 4ft wide by 8ft garden bed sections. I love this spot our our vegetable garden, the space gets lots of sunlight, its super convenient for picking veggies and I'll be able to see our veggies from our kitchen window. This location also allow us to extend our current drip system on the perimeter of our fence line and place emitters directly into our garden beds. This wil cut down on my watering the veggies and be more water savvy, yay! 

 Hasani and I love the look and ease of raised garden beds, and have decided to build raised garden beds for the space. Not going to lie, the space needs a lot of work before we can get to the planting phase of this project. We have boards, old planters and lots of weeds to clear out of the area before we can bring in raised planters. The entire side area where we keep our trash, recycle and green waste containers also needs some love and concealment, but we'll get to that down the line. 


 Behind the raised garden beds, we'd love to build a large privacy trellis and grow some pretty flowering vines. Maybe Carolina jasmine, love how pretty they are!




We're using these plans for Sunset.com to build our raised garden beds. Yesterday we brought materials to build one raised garden bed. We want to build one and see how we like the size in our space before we build the second one. I'm tempted to add a little border ledge around the top of the garden frame, like this it just makes it feel 'finished.' I can already picture the raised garden beds in place. 

The thought of growing our own food makes me so happy! I'm hoping we grown an abundance of food for our home and also to share with family and friends. Our list of what we plan to grow changes daily, our goal is to grow a salad / salsa garden. We want to grow a few varieties of tomatoes, chili peppers, lettuce, spinach, and a variety of herbs. Each time we stop in Home Depot or Lowes our list of veggies keep changing. Yesterday, I saw mint and peppermint chocolate, I just have to grow both! In addition to grow lots of veggies, I want to grow strawberries in a large pot and maybe blueberries. I plan on doing lots of research and even buy a beginner gardening book before we decided on exactly what to plant for crop, I'll for sure do an update and share what we end up planting. 
via www.ehow.com 

Wishing I could fast forward thought my 9-5 day and get started building our first raised garden bed. I can't wait until I can spend a little time tending to our little garden and picking fresh tomatoes to enjoy at home. For this garden project we are taking a weekend by weekend approach, so hopefully by the end of the month we'll have our plants planted. 

 Are you working on garden this year? 

Our Backyard Progress & Plans

It's always been a dream of mine to have an amazing backyard. I've always wanted a backyard we can play with the kids, entertain our friends, watch movies under the stars, grill amazing food and grow our own veggies. I want our backyard to feel like an extension of the inside our home. Since our home sat empty for almost an entire year and was a construction zone, our backyard was thrashed (trashed is probably a more accurate word) just like our front yard. We had several trees in our backyard, after much debate decided to remove many of them. Most of the trees were unhealthy or too close to our phone lines (hello old home with low hanging phone & cable lines) We decided we wanted to start with a clean slate and bring more shrubs and a tree of two over time, but I'll get to more of that in a few.

Progress pictures are always most fun we you see where we started right? I looked though my phone and computer and sadly was unable to find pictures of our backyard with the trees in place after moving back home, anyways in the pictures below clearly shows the sad state of our backyard. Here's a wide shot of our backyard taken with my iPhone, the french doors on the left lead to our master bedroom, to the right of the french doors are Avery's twin windows (so happy we went that route!) and the door off our patio leads into our mudroom / laundry room area. 







After removing those trees, we decided we want and expanse of lush green grass with a border along our fences for shrubs and possibly another tree in the future. The backyard underwent major prep work: grinding tree stumps, soil prep and sprinkler system overhaul and finally sod went down. We went thought a local company called Delta Bluegrass for our sod and bought over 2400 sq feet of sod for our front and backyard, we also had them do the installation. The installation of the sod was seamless and quick, when we installed sod last time Hasani did the installation, but since we had so much sod to install this go time, it only made back breaking sense to get the job done quick. 

 Here's our backyard now (some of the pictures are recent and a few, a few weeks after the sod was installed) Our sod has grown in nice and thick, and so so green! We planted shrubs in the garden bed in front of Avery's bedroom windows. Ideally I'd like to add even more flowering shrubs this Spring. 



I love hydrangeas, in the past I've planted a few only to watch them die days later. I decided I'd try one last time and planted two hydrangeas on either side our our french doors. I planted them in October, they looked dead over the winter and now are growing back, and getting bigger each day! I fell in love with Limelight Hydrangeas after Pinning these pretties, I want to plant some Limelight Hydrangeas along the left side of our back fence. I love the size of those hydrangeas and think once they take off and grow, they would add so much color and privacy. If they do well, I'll be planting more and more! 



This Spring, we'd love to add a vegetable garden (more details & location coming next week) along with making a trellis for vines and added privacy. We bought a fire pit and not need to select a perfect location in our backyard. We also want to add patio furniture for outdoor dining and lounging along with potted plants. 

 This weekend Hasani and I  are taking advantage of our Spring weather will be doing lots of yard work: pulling weeds, planting flowers, shrubs and prepping for our vegetable garden beds.

 What do you think our backyard transformation? Are you working on any yard related projects this weekend?