Our First Garden 2017

Our back year is a perfect small enclosed space for our boston terrier dogs, but we decided to try something new this year. This is our first time gardening, so we decided to just try out some garden ideas: plant some vegetable seeds and flowers to see how all this works. I took a lot of pics and recorded everything in a journal.

Starting inside on May 7, I planted two kinds of tomato seeds in a seed starter kit.  My random selections were  McKenzie “Tiny Tim” and McKenzie “Sow Easy” Better Boy Hybrid. Then on May 21, we moved to the outside.

Black Peat

Once those seeds were snugly bedded down inside, we ordered some screened topsoil, mushroom compost, and black peat soil from Greely Sand and Gravel. It was so easy to order on line and a huge truck came and delivered this wonderful rich dark soil in a convenient bag right onto our lawn. When we tried to move it into the back yard, we discovered that that sucker was not moving without a crane! Firing up the handy colour-coordinated wheelbarrow, we ended up making numerous trips back and forth to the back yard.

We prepared two garden areas: one for vegetables and one for flowers. The vegetable area was along the back of the house where we had some old paving stones. They were beginning to sink and frankly we never really used that area except for storage since we had a deck on the other side of the house. We decided to pull up the stones and fill in with the new soil.  This spot got a ton of afternoon sun, but the morning was shade allowing us to work without getting too crispy.

The second area was around our little apple tree.  This would be for flowers to nourish bees and generally all round prettiness. We expanded a circle around the tree and transferred some of the paving stones here to create a border around the edge before adding the gleaming topsoil.  We selected some bright yellow marigolds, a tall yellow calla lily and silvery dusty miller for the edges.  You can follow the flower garden here or you can find out the fate of the vegetables here.