Always love seeing pics of your perfectly laid out and maintained garden.

I was gonna wait to share pics until it all filled in, but it looks so much better than it did two or three months ago, that I couldn't help myself.

What'll be pretty is when the alyssum grows up. The front property line is now surrounded by tiny little alyssum seedlings, planted about eight to ten inches apart. Imagine a white flowery border about a foot high and a foot wide, all around the front garden.

Superb!

I think your garden is beautiful. I hope you will share more pictures of it with us.

I always love seeing what other people are doing, it helps me so much with my garden.

it is really beautiful.
kim

Don't peer and squint at the grass in that lawn, tho'.

I haven't counted, but I think there's four dozen different types of grass and weeds in it...

Beautiful! We are in the second year of improving our yard/garden. I can only hope it looks at least half as good as yours after another year or two.

Here's what we started with.

When we moved in, I backed the 27' U-Haul truck right up to the front door...and when we were finished unloading, you couldn't tell the truck had ever been in the yard. No tire tacks, Nuthin'. The dirt in this yard was like one big brick (Except for a corner by the water and gas meters. That corner was a bit sandy, fer some reason)

Although it's hard to see in this pic, the grade was so uneven that it resembled a wrinkled quilt on top of a lumpy mattress...and most of the drainage led right to the foundation of the house.

Some of the dirt was so hard that I had to use a pick-maddox to loosen it up enough to get a shovel in it.

So, no matter if you've just begun your own garden, there's hope. If we can do what we've done with this place? You can do whatever needs doing at your own home. It takes patience and a fair bit of planning and work, though.

Wow, your garden is really beautiful. I sometimes dream of growing a bunch of edibles in the front yard but I'm so busy in the back yard that I haven't had the time to entertain those ideas. I would like to at least get a couple of fruit trees out there.

Cynthia

Just to let you know the density of the plantings...

The number before the descriptive indicates different types or varieties, not individual plants.

19 different kinds of flowers.
4 of lettuce
arugula
Spinach
mustard greens.
2 bush bean.
2 strawberries
potatoes
5 squash
2 watermelon.
3 berry canes.
4 trees
2 mint
3 asparagus
5 herbs, or is it 6? I ferget.
2 garlic
5 tomatoes (if they all come up)
collards
radish
turnips
2 cabbages
rhubarb
5 or 6 kinds of peppers (if they all come up), including hot peppers.
beets.

That's most of it, anyway. I know there's a couple that I'm forgetting about...

So, we have more 5 dozen different varieties or types of plants - and hundreds of individual plants - in the front garden.

Keep in mind that I direct sow all of the veggies. I also save seeds from harvests from the year before. We generally have plenty of seeds to play with, just in case the weather trashes my first or second planting. (Which has happened twice, this year. Once was a late cold snap followed by variable temps, the other was a driving rain storm which scattered all of my freshly planted seeds, and what it didn't scatter, it buried, and what it didn't bury, it dumped in a bunch in one spot the size of your hand. It did that with everything I'd planted that week. Eh. Just part of the deal. Goes with the territory. Just rake it off and replant and transplant.)

otoh, now we have more tomato seedlings than I know what to do with. The weather buried them, scattered them and bunched them. They came up anyway...eventually, but only after I'd replanted more tomatoes, of course. I'll just transplant them to empty spots in other parts of the garden and hope for the best. like I sad, goes with the territory. Gotta improvise, adapt and overcome. No big deal.

What did you do for uniform grass outside the beds. I've been scouting and reviewing the last few days and I think I have very turf grass on the market and several wild cereal grains.

Did you just weed?

The grass in that garden looks so good because it's all green. A lot of weeds in it, right now. It's mostly Bermuda. I dig out the bigger weeds now and then. Once or twice a year I spray it with Miracle Gro. Mow it once a week and water it every couple days. Otherwise I don't mess with it.

I think the big trick is the way I run the line trimmer. I 'sculpt' the edges so the edge of the lawn around the beds looks beveled. Keep it mowed and keep it 'beveled' and the symmetry fools the eye. Once you see it in person - and pay attention and take a closer look - you notice the details.

Note: The other factor is that the grass is now surrounded by beds, all of which have a lot of amendments in them. The nutrients have leached under the beds and drained into the grass. That helps to keep things green and lookin' good. At this point, most of the soil under that garden is brown to dark brown as much as two feet down, now. In some places the soil is almost black.

This post was edited by wbonesteel on Sun, Apr 27, 14 at 21:18

I notice the clover surrounding my 2 year -old front plot is bigger and healthier than ever. We need to mow. We need to mow before we get fined. But the weather hasn't been agreeable and it hasn't gone to seed, yet. In fact, it only just recently flowered and the bees rely on it after the grape hyacinths die back.

I really look forward to getting some type of symmetry in the front yard so when I let it grow it will look decorative. The city isn't harsh, but folks appreciate intentional design. Heck, it's not vegetables I'm worried about up front. I have natural cereal grains perfect as rabbit food/hay and it likes to grow up front. Some of it is very pretty. But it hasn't matured for me to capture those seeds. I hope to grow it along the contour lines in the rear. Will be graceful.

So, what you've got here is very encouraging though my needs are different for the front. Concept is the same.

Warren, Your front garden always looks so nice.

Do you garden in the back too?

Dawn

Dawn, other than a couple of grape vines and some irises, I don't do any gardening in the back yard. The wife's dogs own the back yard, for one thing. Once in awhile, the dogs give me permission to mow the grass.

We have some beds along the fences in the back yard. I laid out and installed those when we re-graded the back yard during the first year we were here. The grade in back was much worse than the front. It was a leg breaker.

I've tried to grow a few things in those beds, but between the shade and the dogs, not much luck.

Those beds still need more compost, peat and composted manure. I did ad some sulfur to them, this spring. I might try to move some flower bulbs to those beds this fall - more because I don't have room for them anywhere else than for any hopes of having any success with the project. In a week or so, with or without additional amendments, I'm going to transplant alyssum seedlings to those beds and see how that works out.

If it weren't for the dogs, I'd be using every inch of the back yard that I could get away with.

Here's a pic of the back yard. Taken from the northeast corner of the house, looking over the gate, facing southeast. The lower center of the pic shows bare dirt, One of these days, I'd like to put in a gravel path from that point running around the house and then around the yard, beside the beds along the fences. A bird bath and dwarf fruit trees are in that plan somewhere, too.

Yeah. I mowed it last Friday. I'll be mowing it again, in a few minutes.

Gorgeous! All that hard work has paid off! Its awesome!

Your yard is beautiful. I hope you continue to share your pictures.
Sammy

Thanks for all the compliments, folks! I do appreciate it.

I tend to be proud of our garden, mebbe a little too proud, sometimes. ;)

I try not to share too many pics because I don't want to bore anyone. You know... 'There he goes; bragging on his garden, again...and again...'

When you work that hard on something that beautiful you earn the rights. I love pictures of what others are doing.
jus my 2 cents
kim

I cannot agree with ya more, kim.