Drainage Update - Mud, Mud, and More Mud

We are getting super close to getting our fancy french drains installed. My husband has dug all the necessary trenches and our back yard/side yard look a dachshund obstacle course.

Aren't these some beautiful trenches?:

Right now our only problem is rain. It's been raining for two days. This pushes back the install AND all this exposed dirt + puppies = really muddy house. My weekend is going to be filled with lots of vacuuming and spot cleaning our abused couch. There is literally perfect, muddy dog prints all over it.

But it's supposed to warm up next week, so hopefully we'll get all this finished and can get back to working on the garden and taking care of our weed issue. We have weeds. Lots of them.

Comments

My Little Review of Smart Gardener

My good friend introduced me to Smart Gardener via Pinterest . The description was something along the lines of, "this site plans your garden for you." As a new gardener, I was skeptical. Sounds a little too good to be true, but I checked it out anyways. At first I was enamored. It allows for garden planning in 4 steps: 1. Layout your garden - you are able to choose the square footage of an in-ground garden, or choose from a variety of containers/raised beds. Cool! 2. Select your plants - this is limited by season, and you cannot mix cool weather and warm weather vegetables. Not cool! Varieties of vegetables are also limited if you are looking for something specific, but you can add them manually. 3. View your plan - you get a little image with your selected plants on it, plus the space they require in your garden (square footage), planting depths, seed spacing, plant dimensions, and what to plant next to each other or not (F...

"New" Tomato Cages

One day (in 2014) I stumbled upon a post in the LA Times about tomato cages (article from 2012). There seems to be a lot of theories out there about how to grow tomatoes (up, on the ground, upside down?), and I knew our homemade cages last year where just painfully too short for how large those plants became. I really liked this cage configuration from the Times - it seemed simple enough and cost friendly enough. I initially checked out some of the basic cages at the nursery and were surprised how expensive they were. I went to Home Depot and was able to find fun colored ones for roughly $6 each. My wonderful mom purchased 10 for me, paired by color. They are nice enough that they can be reused year from year, and they stack well - not taking up too much room in an already too full garage. I was able to buy a pack of 6 bamboo poles for $3. So 5 permanent cages for $35-40. Perfect. Setting up the cages was relatively painl...

Garden Fence - Part 1

If you happen to live in the Denver area, you know we have plenty of bunnies. These bunnies: Which on my cute, let's-make-baby-sounds-days, I like to call bun-buns. As a matter a fact, we found abandoned baby bunnies in our yard last year, despite our best efforts at bunny-proofing. Outside of the baby bunny incident, we had no bunny impresses last summer. Winter hit and bam, bunny tracks. My husband located our vulnerabilities and is currently fixing spots in the overall fence to prevent bunny impress (yes, I love the word impress, I just imagine little bunny spies). On top of bunnies, we have the aforementioned dogs (aka da babies). I can just see them lovingly digging up tomato plants now. My husband and I have been discussing (read: arguing) about the fence for a while now. I want something nice looking, but also cheap, which doesn't exactly go together. I also have no conceptual idea of what building a fence entails....

Project Garden Noob - Year 6

Search This Blog