Project Garden Noob - Year 6

Year 5 ended with a fizzle, hence the lack of posts.  My one really good tomato plant was ravaged by a mouse.   We killed it for good measure, alas it was too late. With the tomatoes I did have, I dehydrated them and turned them into tomato powder - which is totally a product people use, I had no idea (see here , here and here ).  It's now August 2018, have a used it?  Big fat nope.  Yeah...I suck.  It's still living in my pantry, vacuum-sealed. So, let's fast forward to this year - Year 6.  I had my second son on June 8th (Yay!).  Doing anything remotely enjoyable with two children under 5 is neigh impossible. Yes, I have planted tomatoes, and I have planted a zucchini, but not much progress in containers or working with our land has happened.  Shocking right? On top of that, it's been an unusually hot summer here in Colorado, so the tomatoes in my raised beds are not loving life, the tomato plant I put closer to the ground (...

You'd be surprised what you can get done in a day with enough motivation.  In this case, that motivation is my mom, surprising us with a delivery of 3 tons of pea gravel.  She came over with some landscape felt, stakes, and the determination to fix our weed pile in the back yard under the raised beds. I'll be honest, the weed farm that was growing under these beds was ugly and soul crushing. Sadly, I didn't exactly want to grab a picture of the weed-sanity, but take the picture below and add every weed known to man under it, especially thistle, and you'll have a good "before" image. We started by taking out as many weeds as we could stand and laying down TWO layers of landscape felt.  One was kinda cheap, left over from other projects, and the one my mom brought was really tough, like can't-rip-apart-by-hand tough.  We started furiously covering the ground and as we got moving along, my mom started moving rock in while I continued to lay landscape fe...

I never thought I would utter the words, "you care more about the yard than me" to my husband this summer. But I have.  Several times in fact. Cary has been working like a beast to get the garden shed done.  It's been on it's foundation for a couple weeks now and I've found a couple things to do to help make it feel like less of an eye sore. This is the view directly to the left of our patio area. And from the front of the shed. Inside the shed My mom had the bright idea of putting some sort of outside art on it, which I was digging, then I had the idea of adding some functional space to the shed foundation.  Et Voilà I splurged on some fancy-ish trellises to hold up some crawlers.  I have cucumbers in one and I was going to put snap peas in the other, but realized I didn't buy snap peas this year.  So I tossed the sunflower seeds in there.  We'll see what happens! It's coming together folks.  Obviously, we have quite a b...

I planned on doing soil testing for probably the last five years. I thought it would be fun to see what came back.  So this year, with the excuse of a new garden space and how important it is to check your soil for any dangerous components (read: lead), I purchased the plastic bottle and instructions for sending in a soil sample to the extension office at Colorado State University. I picked up the kit at Tagawa's this winter and sent it in this spring.  You basically collect bits of soil from different parts of the garden bed, mix it all up, make sure it is dry, and mail it in.  You also have a form to fill out with history of the area, planned use, and any amendments that have been done or are planned.   I was shocked when my soil report arrived in my email inbox.  I'm not sure why, I guess I just assumed I'd get a report via snail mail.  I took some screen shots of the pertinent information I received, mainly pH, texture, organic material, and miner...