My flower beds

Remember how I told you how much I hate to weed?  Yes, it's true.  I hate to get my hands dirty at all.  So as we have been working on our backyard, we decided to do raised flower beds, using the same technique as the square foot gardening.
It was The Doctor's idea to use rocks for the walls instead of wood.  And would you like to know how much we paid for these big rocks?  Rocks that cost .87 each at Lowe's?  We paid NOTHING, except sweat and tears.  They all came from our backyard as we tilled before putting down dirt and sod.  Every. Single. Rock.

We put landscape fabric underneath, just like we did with the garden, and then used the rocks for walls and filled in with the dirt/peat moss/vermiculite mixture.  We have some flowers, some plants, and some herbs.

I love how they turned out.  Very natural looking.  And watering?  I water every day when I water the garden.  It takes about 10 seconds on each flower bed.  So simple!

This is the front of my house.  I have daisies and iris's thanks to my next door neighbor, Melissa!  And the rest we are filling in with wildflowers.  My goal is to get so many flowers in there the weeds can't grow.  I love how it is looking.

So it's all still a work in progress, but after 5 years of living here, I am starting to enjoy my yard!

Square Foot Gardening

I love, love, love square foot gardening.  If you don't know what I am talking about, there is a whole web site dedicated to it.  I hate to weed.  Some people love to go out and dig in the dirt.  Not me.  Yuck!  So square foot gardening is perfect because there are little to no weeds to worry about.  And watering!  It takes me 5 minutes to water this whole garden.  Seriously!  You put a cup of water on each plant each day.  The soil (which is a mix of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite) holds the moisture in.  I love it!
Let me take you on a tour of my garden.
This tree is a plum tree.   And we think it's a flowering plum because it had beautiful blossoms, but there is no fruit growing!  All our other fruit trees have fruit, but this one?  Nada.  Bummer!  However, underneath the tulle are strawberries.  Yummy, tart, delicious strawberries.  They are so good!  The tulle is to keep the birds from eating them.  It was much cheaper (.97 a yard) than buying the netting from the garden center!

Just look at this beauty waiting to be picked!  He didn't last long after I took this picture.

Here is another "plum" tree with cabbages underneath.  I have really come to love cabbage over the last couple of years.   I guess it is true that your tastes change as you get older.  You can see one of our raised flower beds behind.  That is another post!

This is one of our newest boxes this year.  We planted black Krim tomatoes, purple Cherokee tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, and hot peppers in it.  I know what you are thinking.  I planted peppers?  No, they are for The Teenager.  He has discovered he loves hot and spicy!

Peach tree with more strawberries.

More strawberries.  Yum! 

Zucchini.  I love zucchini.  Cooked with butter and salt.  I could live on that!  All the chicken wire is to keep the neighborhood cats from digging in it.  I hate cats.  Sorry, Melissa!

Another peach tree and more strawberries!

Now the tomatoes.  The Doctor bought the plants from the greenhouse at the high school where he teaches.  They already had tomatoes on them!  We planted 12.  Then he came home with 6 more.  Then we bought the black and purple ones.  I now have 17 tomato plants!  I love it!

More tomatoes.

And more tomatoes!

Spaghetti squash.  I love using spaghetti squash instead of noodles.  It is so tasty!

This is an apple tree with more strawberries!

This poor little box is struggling.  We have carrots from last year that don't taste good, but we just haven't pulled them yet, Swiss chard, and more carrots growing. 

Another apple tree with more strawberries.

So that is a total of 14 boxes.  Some small, some bigger, all easy to take care of.  If you scavenge for the wood, the most expensive part is the dirt.  But it is so worth it for me!  I actually enjoy watering my garden and looking for stray weeds because there are only going to be 2 or 3!  And if you want to come over and take a look, please do!  I love to show it off!  I am not an expert, and we keep learning things about it.  But it's fun and easy!
Oh, and all the space in between the boxes are going to be filled in with bark chips.  We just haven't gotten to it yet!  I had to let you know that!  LOL