The back yard garden issues
The first question about the garden: how much vegetable space do I want to maintain? So far, we've admired the ornamentals in front and on the side, as well as the ornamentals in the part-shade in back, but planted tomatoes and basil in the full-sun bed, primarily because it was empty, though they'd cut the existing perennials back so far that it was kind of hard to tell the difference in late March. We put the plants in a little late, but they grew just fine - stunningly large basil crop, and pretty decent tomatoes until late-season blight caught up with us. The plan for next summer has gone through a couple of iterations: first, we were going to continue the border bed all along the back fence, narrowing the widest part of the lawn down to 14 feet or so, but getting another 32 linear feet of full-sun bed. This Plan A also included an apsaragus patch, but I think I've decided it's not a dense enough crop for me to truly want to bother with in our limited borders. Which is not to say that I need t oplant a zillion other things instead. Current plan B is a bit more restrained: the next phase of adventure is to really fill the bed that was 6 tomato plants this year, with a couple of other likely characters. I will, I think, keep the part of Plan A that involved clearing out the ornamentals from the part-sun bed (the oddly stinky plant that smells just like Michael's Crafts has been identified as yarrow, and must go, though maybe I'll leave the one in front) to be replaced with kale and beets and swiss chard. Plan A involved a tiered herb planter either in ziggurat or fence-hanging form (to put a large tree stump in "not my yard", the fence swerves in at the yard edge of the patio, meaning the bed is barely a foot wide there, and has roots) but plan B is to just stick some garlic in there and hope for the best, then fit in basil and thyme into whatever space is left.
Second issue: there are no trees in this yard. There's honestly not much space for trees, so that's okay. The back corner is about 20 feet from the nearest house (ours) but the back fence is actually built off a terrace a couple of feet above a parking lot, so the root space doesn't continue. I could imagine some tall bush thing there. In fact I very much was imagining that, something like a lilac, or a smallish fruit tree; but then I considered how I don't have an unlimited supply of sun, and that would really add shade that I don't want if I'm trying to grow stuff. So, maybe no tree. But mmmm, fruit!! How about just not beating back the canes off the neighbor's raspberry plants that have started popping up on our side of the fence? Or planting something of my very own. What do I love? cherries. plums. No, I will not try to manage a fruit tree. There was a little while when I was convinced a grape arbor was exactly what I wanted, just a little shade over the grassy part of the yard and delicious grapes... then I realized that while Concord grapes are tasty and would grow here, I like about 1 cluster of them and then I'm done. So, no. Blueberries, then. I also love not fussing too much, and novelty, and I think blueberries don't quite fit either of those. I am seriously considering gooseberries, as well as juneberries. For some reason I'm thinking of gooseberries as being canier and less spherical than blueberries, and that's a good thing - putting an 8-foot beach-ball-shape in the back corner would kind of wreck the open part of the yard. I also have these images of little caged blueberry bushes hiding from the birds under protective netting, and that doesn't appeal to me so much, but I guess that's just a hazard of having fruit. The nice thing is I can wait till spring to figure this out, but since permanent plants can take a couple of years to get going, I want to have it planted and getting established over the summer.
I am seriously considering guerilla gardening with the raspberries; we've got a supply of little shoots that pop up in our yard from our neighbor's plants, but not a ton of space. There is, however, a large field of scrubby boring inedible plants behind my workplace, or in fact, all over that office park complex. Wouldn't some raspberries just make that a better place to be?
Second issue: there are no trees in this yard. There's honestly not much space for trees, so that's okay. The back corner is about 20 feet from the nearest house (ours) but the back fence is actually built off a terrace a couple of feet above a parking lot, so the root space doesn't continue. I could imagine some tall bush thing there. In fact I very much was imagining that, something like a lilac, or a smallish fruit tree; but then I considered how I don't have an unlimited supply of sun, and that would really add shade that I don't want if I'm trying to grow stuff. So, maybe no tree. But mmmm, fruit!! How about just not beating back the canes off the neighbor's raspberry plants that have started popping up on our side of the fence? Or planting something of my very own. What do I love? cherries. plums. No, I will not try to manage a fruit tree. There was a little while when I was convinced a grape arbor was exactly what I wanted, just a little shade over the grassy part of the yard and delicious grapes... then I realized that while Concord grapes are tasty and would grow here, I like about 1 cluster of them and then I'm done. So, no. Blueberries, then. I also love not fussing too much, and novelty, and I think blueberries don't quite fit either of those. I am seriously considering gooseberries, as well as juneberries. For some reason I'm thinking of gooseberries as being canier and less spherical than blueberries, and that's a good thing - putting an 8-foot beach-ball-shape in the back corner would kind of wreck the open part of the yard. I also have these images of little caged blueberry bushes hiding from the birds under protective netting, and that doesn't appeal to me so much, but I guess that's just a hazard of having fruit. The nice thing is I can wait till spring to figure this out, but since permanent plants can take a couple of years to get going, I want to have it planted and getting established over the summer.
I am seriously considering guerilla gardening with the raspberries; we've got a supply of little shoots that pop up in our yard from our neighbor's plants, but not a ton of space. There is, however, a large field of scrubby boring inedible plants behind my workplace, or in fact, all over that office park complex. Wouldn't some raspberries just make that a better place to be?