Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post #2097: Starting a garden again
It feels like a million years since I last posted about gardening. That’s partly because it’s wintertime, but also – I haven’t had strong feelings about my garden for the past couple of years. When we moved into our house seven years ago, we immediately tore up the backyard and installed garden boxes, and have added trees, perennials, and ornaments to our garden space each year since. But while it’s got many fabulous qualities (sitting out on warm summer evenings surrounded by our lush veggie boxes is one of my great pleasures), there are some things about our original plan which just didn’t work as much as I wanted them to.
For one thing, we have a North-facing yard which gets some decent light towards the back (away from the house) but around the house itself is in shade most of the time. I had tried to compensate for this by planting greens in the boxes closest to the house, but the difference between the boxes which get good light, and those which don’t points to a lot of wasted effort in planting and maintaining things which will not grow well no matter what I do. On the other hand, our BBQ sits over on the brick patio near our studio, which gets so hot in the summer that cooking is miserable in that space.
So we’re going to switch things up this year with the goal of bringing more functionality to our yard space, in addition to replacing our garden boxes which have started to fall apart (not bad for a bunch of cedar fencing that I bought cheap on Craigslist – we got six years out of it!). We are so far planning to:
- tear down the current garden boxes
- build a new set of boxes
- build a deck on the cool side of the yard with room for the bbq
- refill all boxes with new soil
- remulch
- build some garden furniture for the deck and sitting area
This is a lot of work, obviously, and there’s a part of me that knows that we can’t do everything this year. But that won’t stop me from trying. I’d also like to configure a new, small water feature since it’s so good for the backyard birds and insects to have flowing water around and my current water bowl is cracked and doesn’t hold liquid anymore.
I’m looking forward to a bit of a refresh in hopes of creating more usable space for hanging out, while also maintaining some of the food-growing potential that the sunnier part of the yard holds. More on this subject soon as I plan to measure and draw up plans later on this week!
Red Cedar 
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