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New Yard...New Problems and some Mother's Day Planting

I'm going to be honest here:  the yard situation is making me pretty depressed.  Normally this is the time of year I look forward to the most, but some new realizations about our yard have made gardening life stressful.

1. We don't have as much yard as our first house - I know, we were super excited about this fact when we purchased our current home, but now that I'm trying to get into the planning stage of a garden, I miss my 10' x 25' garden.  If I replicated this space in my current yard, there would be no yard.  Now, that doesn't necessarily sound like a bad idea to me, but with a kiddo, we want him to have some running room and possible a playset.

2. Our yard faces west - I didn't think through how important orientation is to the "sun" factor.  The area I wanted to put the garden - up against a fence like our last house - won't work.  I timed the sun and after 1-2pm, the fence casts a shadow so this area only gets about six hours of sun a day.  It's simply not enough for sun-loving plants, like squashes and beans.  Our previous house had a southern exposure so sun was never a problem.

3. Garden shed debacle, which you can read about here (Update coming soon).

Since I can't resolve any of these matters quickly, we went ahead with what we have, planting on Mother's Day.  In our largest raised bed, we planted three tomatoes:  Early Girl, Cherokee Purple, and San Marzano (paste tomato).

In the smaller bed, I planted a Sun Sugar Cherry and three bell pepper plants (Early Summer).  The peppers were a bit of  an impulse buy, so I simply picked up three of the same variety.

In one of the strawberry planters I have transplanted strawberries from our yard, the other has a Bush Early Girl.  I wanted to experiment with its size, so I'm giving it a whirl.  I also have spinach (Bloomsdale) and lettuce (Buttercrunch) planted and going strong. 




In the plot by the back fence, I only planted carrots (Rainbow Blend, Danvers Half Long) and beets (Early Wonder, Golden).  My husband has put a couple watermelon (Sugar Baby) back there as well, but shocker - they are already dead.

And they are dead because - the one year I didn't wait until Memorial Day - we got snow right after we planted.  We did our best to cover everything, and thus far it looks like everyone survived but the watermelon.

I'm still going to try a zucchini by the fence, since it should grow anywhere.  And I got some containers to put cucumbers and sugar snap peas (hopefully this weekend), which is a bit of a late start, but I have my reasons....



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