Garden Sketches: Vegetable Garden
Now that my veggies are actually planted (well, mostly - I got the main staples; I may pick up a few more here and there throughout the Spring), I figured I'd share some sketches of what my gardens actually look like.
The Veggie Garden:
Plant list, roughly from left to right:
* Esperanza ("Yellow Bells")
* Yellow Pear and Roma tomatoes
* Sweet Basil (unlabeled - by the stepping stone)
* Strawberries (from last year - three plants, clustered together)
* "Mucho Nacho" and "Big Chili" Anaheim/New Mexico style peppers
* Bean trellis with Kentucky Wonder beans on it, and garlic and Thai Basil underneath
* Random Daffodils that I planted aeons ago
* The star-looking things around the border are garlic, onions, and shallots
* Garlic chives (you'll find at least one of these in almost every garden I have; I'm up to here with freaking Garlic Chives)
My neighbor's two-storey house casts some pretty hefty shade over my yard in the afternoons from the west - which is a lifesaver when the Summers get really bad, and the only reason I can grow anything at all in my backyard, which would otherwise be in nearly 100% full sun all day long. Naturally, this is the only part of the yard where my "lawn" is usually more grass than weeds.
One of the things I've always loved about this garden is that it's right outside my bedroom windows. The Esperanza (and the Mulberry Tree, out in the yard) provide privacy and a bit of shade at the east end of the room. The bean trellis is about six feet tall, and upside-down-U-shaped - so while it also provides shade and privacy for the room, as well as shade for the garlic and Thai Basil growing underneath it, it also provides an escape from the bedroom window should I ever need to climb out in the middle of the night, hehe.
Earlier in the year, when I re-arranged the pattern of [concrete] cobblestones on the patio, I used several of them to extend a border around the vegetable garden, to unify the space visually, and also to provide a little walkway from the patio to check on the veggies.
October 2009
March 2008 - bamboo bean teepees
2005 - the first veggie garden I planted at this house.
Funny story about the 2005 garden: I got sick that March, right after I took this picture, and couldn't work in the yard for over a month. When I finally emerged, I found that my nice little arrangement here was no more. The tomatoes had grown like crazy - fell over and rooted where they landed, had started vining up into the window screens, rooted into the wooden frames and knocked most of them over (and yes, they were screwed and staked together). The entire area was one big tomato patch that had completely swallowed all the other plants. I still find random tomato plants popping up out in front of my current veggie garden, and off to the side, from this incident. It took me SIX HOURS to clean it all up, and like eight trash bags (I composted most of it in the bags, since I didn't have a bin at this point). It was all I could do: once tomatoes go crazy like that, they barely fruit at all, since all their energy is focused on TAKING OVER THE WORLD. I wish I'd taken a photo. Imagine this same shot, but nothing but tomato vines - from this angle you couldn't even see the fence.
.
The Veggie Garden:
Plant list, roughly from left to right:
* Esperanza ("Yellow Bells")
* Yellow Pear and Roma tomatoes
* Sweet Basil (unlabeled - by the stepping stone)
* Strawberries (from last year - three plants, clustered together)
* "Mucho Nacho" and "Big Chili" Anaheim/New Mexico style peppers
* Bean trellis with Kentucky Wonder beans on it, and garlic and Thai Basil underneath
* Random Daffodils that I planted aeons ago
* The star-looking things around the border are garlic, onions, and shallots
* Garlic chives (you'll find at least one of these in almost every garden I have; I'm up to here with freaking Garlic Chives)
My neighbor's two-storey house casts some pretty hefty shade over my yard in the afternoons from the west - which is a lifesaver when the Summers get really bad, and the only reason I can grow anything at all in my backyard, which would otherwise be in nearly 100% full sun all day long. Naturally, this is the only part of the yard where my "lawn" is usually more grass than weeds.
One of the things I've always loved about this garden is that it's right outside my bedroom windows. The Esperanza (and the Mulberry Tree, out in the yard) provide privacy and a bit of shade at the east end of the room. The bean trellis is about six feet tall, and upside-down-U-shaped - so while it also provides shade and privacy for the room, as well as shade for the garlic and Thai Basil growing underneath it, it also provides an escape from the bedroom window should I ever need to climb out in the middle of the night, hehe.
Earlier in the year, when I re-arranged the pattern of [concrete] cobblestones on the patio, I used several of them to extend a border around the vegetable garden, to unify the space visually, and also to provide a little walkway from the patio to check on the veggies.
October 2009
March 2008 - bamboo bean teepees
2005 - the first veggie garden I planted at this house.
Funny story about the 2005 garden: I got sick that March, right after I took this picture, and couldn't work in the yard for over a month. When I finally emerged, I found that my nice little arrangement here was no more. The tomatoes had grown like crazy - fell over and rooted where they landed, had started vining up into the window screens, rooted into the wooden frames and knocked most of them over (and yes, they were screwed and staked together). The entire area was one big tomato patch that had completely swallowed all the other plants. I still find random tomato plants popping up out in front of my current veggie garden, and off to the side, from this incident. It took me SIX HOURS to clean it all up, and like eight trash bags (I composted most of it in the bags, since I didn't have a bin at this point). It was all I could do: once tomatoes go crazy like that, they barely fruit at all, since all their energy is focused on TAKING OVER THE WORLD. I wish I'd taken a photo. Imagine this same shot, but nothing but tomato vines - from this angle you couldn't even see the fence.
.