Whiteangel's Tiny Garden - Zone 5/6

[Alaska_Freedom]

Plum tree


Apricot tree that will be taken down after new trees (yet to be planted) mature and offer privacy.  My bird feeder in front.


This is my creepy side of the yard, the plum is to the right and the apricot is the the left out of frame.  We have no idea what that plant is against the fence.  It looks like big strawberry plants and vines all the way to the top of the fence by the time a hard freeze kills it.


Closer view of the gravel and slight slope. Crab grass, weeds, gravel, nasty dirt that is hard as a rock.

Wow girlfriend ... I see a lot of yard that can be all tilled up and turned into a garden!  And since that is the creepy side, your OH shouldn't mind you digging it up!  You can rent tillers for the day.

[Alaska_Freedom]

Remember me mentioning that OH just loves his beautiful lawn??  Yeah, right.  I like lawn as much as everyone else, but not when I have a yard that is 150 feet by 90 feet with a tiny 48 square foot planter
:laughing2:Sure beats crying, lol.

I've actually thought about that but the soil there is dirt!!  Like cement (pronounced sea-mint, lol) hard.  He wouldn't do it unless I can show that I can keep up with what I have now.  Said I was great with starting projects and then getting bored with them.  Grrr. 

The sprinkler system would have to be moved.
The ground tilled.
A load of topsoil put down and then the garden soil put on top of that.
It would need to be a raised bed as I just can't get down on my knees.  Gotta be chair level and wood costs a lot. 
In other words money is a factor.

I am actually thinking about getting a few tubs like you have @Graywolf to grow vertical teepees for all vining crops; cucumbers, peas, pole beans, watermelon, cantaloupe and I can't think of others at this time.  Since my family loves broccoli, there needs to be a lot of room for this - at least 10 to 20 plants. 

This is my hope and dreams at least.  My wifely plans are also using the land behind the planter as shown here:


This is also horrible ground.  When we moved it in was covered in pea-gravel which was on top of black plastic and ugly as sin.  We got rid of all that and planned to till it up and put in more lawn - okay that was my hubby's plan, I wanted pure garden!!  That area back there is about 15-20 feet from the planter to the fence.  This would be another area that I plan to take over with containers and a pipe garden. 

I have gardened for years in containers.  Now that we bought our own place - seems like I should actually be planting in the ground.

[Gomez]

Don't give up Angel. Try new stuff. The garden broke our backs last year, that's why we are trying new stuff this year. The green beans and yellow squash in the pipes are doing great. Growing much faster then in this horrible red clay we have for dirt.

[Alaska_Freedom]

Keep posting pics of your pipe garden @Gomez!  I love seeing all the things everyone is doing.  You can share this thread if you don't want to start a new one hon!

[Alaska_Freedom]

Don't give up Angel. Try new stuff. The garden broke our backs last year, that's why we are trying new stuff this year. The green beans and yellow squash in the pipes are doing great. Growing much faster then in this horrible red clay we have for dirt.

I would love to see you start your own garden thread Gomez.  I can't figure out how you are getting a squash plant in pipes.  My squash are 3-4 feet wide and 2-3 foot tall ... ??????????  How do you get that to stay in a pipe?  Please post a thread with pictures ... that would be so cool to see!


@Gomez

[Alaska_Freedom]

@Gomez - I totally agree with Graywolf.  We need pictures!!  We need you starting your own thread so we can all follow your pipe garden.  Gotta admit, I am wondering the same thing GW is - how in the world is squash of any kind staying in the pipe holes, seems they would be top heavy.

[Alaska_Freedom]

In some ways I am like a newbie gardener.  It has been years since I have actually been growing veggies.  I get so excited when things ACTUALLY grow!!  Hubby stays very amused with my and my potato experiment!

On July 5th, I planted 4 2-liter bottles of pole green beans with 4 seeds in each bottle.  I soaked the seeds overnight just like I did the broccoli, some of the bean seeds were even sprouting a little when I planted them about 1/2" down.  Last night when I watered them, nothing was still up though you could see a little disturbance in the soil.  This morning, 5 days later 14 (the other 2 a just breaking through the soil) plants were up and some almost 1 inch high!  I was not only shocked but like a little girl on Christmas morning.  Had to make sure the whole family checked it out.  It made this country girl at heart very pleased to see that they too were excited!

The cool part - the beans were packaged for 2003-2004!!!  100% germination with 10 year old seeds.


I plan to have these grow up garden twine up the side of the house.  The twine will be attached to the siding on the house with strong staples.  Will this be good enough?  Please tell me it will, lol.

[Alaska_Freedom]

BTW - here is how I upload pics from my phone.

Take pic
Send to your email
Save on your desk top (I have a folder for Gardening info there)
Go to this link  http://fotos.fotoflexer.com/c6274f4fdf1a...a6971b.jpg
click - upload photo in the upper right corner
click - upload and find the pic you want to load and double click it
click resize and type in 600 - you don't have to change anything else it does it automatically.
Then click apply
Then click save
Then click URL/Link on the left side menu
Then click Copy To Clipboard

Then come back over to here and on the upper section of the post reply, there is a small blue framed window, when you hold your cursor over it, it will show Insert an image.  Click it.
It will then give you a small window and the area that shows - http://
Highlight over that or just backspace as you don't want that there, your copy will take care of it.

Then paste your info.  To do that, on your keyboard, usually in the lower left corner is a key that has  Ctrl on it.  Press and hold down while typing the V key. Enter.

All done and you pic should be the right size.  For pictures that are long instead of vertical as in landscape, you will use 300 to resize your pic instead of 600. 

Thanks to my daughter this is much easier than using photobucket.  The other nice thing, you don't have to save the image on FotoFlexer which is nice not to have photos floating around all over the place to keep track of!!

[Alaska_Freedom]

I absolutely love all these garden threads. Its so relaxing to read and yet makes me jealous of
how great so many here are doing. That's OK, there is always next year for me lol.....(I hope)
My beans came out the best ever, my corn looks like it was microwaved, all burnt and no sun hmm, the cabbage is doing well so far. Didn't plant much of anything this year because having to go back and forth so much no time to be dedicated to one spot.
Plus the weather is super cool in the day and cold at night.

[Alaska_Freedom]

The first time I ever grew a garden, I was about 24.  I had watched my uncle garden every year with a huge monster that he loved doing!  He lived in a mining community that had company housing and all utilities were free, so water was NEVER an issue.  When the mine closed we all moved into town where he owned a house on a corner lot with a back yard that was close to 1/2 an acre in size.  He didn't want to waste water trying to grow a new garden, plus he was older 70+ and didn't feel up to the task.

All winter I planned.  It was planned out on a huge graph paper and I knew just what I was planting and how many seeds I would use.  Yeah a little OCD when planning anything.

The garden would be using what was called French Intensive Gardening.  The ground was double dug.  The center isle would be 50' x 5'.  As soon as I could put the shovel down 12 inches into the ground, I dug down 12 inches and removed that dirt to the side and this would be down for the whole center isle.  My uncle came out with his tiller and tilled it for me when he saw how hard the ground was.  This was in NM and red clay was the norm.  There was no way he would let a "girl" use his heavy old tiller!!! 

When the first 12 inches of soil was removed, I then dug the next 12 inches of subsoil.  Again my uncle came out and tilled this for me, without me ever asking.  He thought I was completely crazy with what I was doing but he didn't want me to kill myself either, lol.  Next I went to the local vet who had a large farm also, and got tons of free aged manure - 4 regular pickup beds full of this old stuff.  Also 6 bales of hay, also free.  The vet was so happy that someone wanted the manure that had been piled out back for years that he gave me anything I wanted. 

My uncle tilled in a pickup load of aged manure and half a bale of hay into that subsoil.  Then we put the old topsoil back on - so horrible most would consider THIS subsoil, layering manure, hay and 4 inches of soil and then tilled.  Doing this over and over until all the soil was replaced and the center isle was about 6 inches above the regular ground level.

The sides of my garden were also done using this same method - one was 30' x 3' and the other was 40' x 1' as I wouldn't be able to walk around the sides one was against a chain link fence, the other was fenced with chicken wire fencing I found to go around the whole thing.  We had 7 dogs!!  I even made my own gate.  There was a walk area around the whole thing.  I had over 500 square feet of garden.

Yes my uncles thought I was nuts!!  They were like my grandfathers and I loved those two old men so much.  They were my grandmother's brothers on my mom's side.  My grandmother said the only thing I was going to raise was the water bill.  Though my uncle didn't say so, I am sure he felt the same way.

The rest of the French Intensive method is Square Foot gardening.  Here again, my uncle thought I was planting everything waaaay too closely.  He was used to gardens spread out over large areas of land, with melons and squash in hills. 

Guess what?  Had the best and biggest and most awesome my family ever saw.  I gave away tons of produce at work.  I took tons to the rest home.  I froze so much that the freezer couldn't handle any more.  Though only think that didn't grow was the corn.  It was over in another area that I didn't do the Intensive gardening, only worked in aged manure and hay a little.  It didn't give us more than 10 ears of corn out of at least 60 corn stalks.

That was my only real garden.  We moved to Texas after that and there was no way I was going to grow a thing in that humid heat with all the fire ants!!!  Tried to garden shortly after moving to Colorado only the earwigs were eating everything.  That place was even worse than the house here.  They actually burrowed
into the corn, tomatoes, chilies and ate all the beans, and peas.  I grossed out and didn't try again till last year.

One thing about that attempt at the old house.  I had a huge compost area going.  Come Halloween we cut up the old pumpkins and threw them in the compost heap along with the guts.  Before we planted, we raked all that compost that had been aging all winter over the garden area.  We had pumpkins growing everywhere and the earwigs left them alone.  60 huge pumpkins and 20 smaller ones.  My neighbors had two vines grow through the fence to their side and managed to get 6 pumpkins over there.  We call that the year of the PUMPKINS!!!