Project Garden Noob - Year 6

Succulents are all the rage these days with their easy care.  I kinda call shenanigans on this; I've killed every succulent I've owned. A friend of mine needed to go to O'Toole's Garden Center to get her sick succulent diagnosed.  I decided it might be worth the trip to go, learn a little bit, and make a succulent arrangement for my mother-in-law for this past Mother's Day. The first thing I learned is that garden centers carry cactus and succulent specific soil, as seen below.  It's a combination of pumice, soil, and sand that drains better than your average soil.   First I took my chalkboard container and put rocks in the bottom (since there is no hole, water needs a spot to drain to...   Then it was time to add soil and add the succulents.    Here is how it looked all done, living in our dining room until Mother's Day.  The one little succulent shot up compared to when it was purch...

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 su...

It seems like any time we decide to take on a project, we think it's going to be easy.  With the garden shed, easy-peasy right?  Make a foundation of stone and gravel, level, put up shed.  Done. Hahahahahahaha. First, we selected a location and got digging, as seen in my last post .  Cary started digging a bit more and hit a weird spot of gravel.  Then we realized that the electrical boxes are just to the left of the shed location.  Ooops.  We are those idiots that didn't "call before you dig". Sure enough, electrical lines are running right under our desired location.  Time to select a new location (also, so much for lines being 3 feet down, no we didn't break anything)...   Never have I missed our old house and its large yard more.  With our current house and our smaller yard, the choices for a shed were limited. We ended up selecting a spot on the southern fence.  This cuts off our access to a gate quite a bit and we h...

I love how gardening is having such a resurgence around the United States.  Or maybe it never left, I'm just more in tune to its presence now. For example, I was grocery shopping a couple weeks ago at a King Soopers with one of those Starbucks near the entrance.  Low and behold, there was a box of free coffee grounds - Grounds for your Garden. I snagged the last two bags and put them in our compost holding container.  Since we have a tumbler composter, it's recommended to fill with it your materials then stop adding materials until the batch is done, which is the stage we are in right now.  Since I didn't want to stop collecting kitchen scraps, we took a plastic tub with some holes and that's where "compost ingredients of the future" go. Other exciting news, I finally broke down and agreed to get a shed for our back yard.  There are so many bulky items taking up our garage (i.e., wheelbarrow, fertilizer spreader, various sleds and kid equipment, etc.....

Several weeks ago I went to Wilmore Outdoor Living Center , which is about 15 minutes from my house, at Broadway and County Line Road.  I had come here last summer as an alternative to T agawa Gardens , since it's a bit more of a drive.  My husband had gotten me a gift card from some occasion and I decided to load up on seeds for Spring.  I purchased seeds mostly from Lake Valley Organics, which have worked well for me in the past. So far my haul included: Zucchini (Black Beauty) Sunflower (Mammoth Greystripe - for bees) Beans (Royal Burgundy and Kentucky Wonder) Carrots (Danvers Half Long and Rainbow Blend) Beets (Early Wonder and Golden) Lettuce (Buttercrunch) Oregano (Greek) Chives (Some heirloom variety, no name provided) Spinach (Bloomsdale Longstanding) Acorn Squash (Table Queen Acorn) Spaghetti Squash (Vegetable Spaghetti - Heirloom) Butternut Squash (Waltham Butternut) Zinnias (California Giants - for color and bees) Cucumber (Straight...

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I finally ventured to O'Toole's Garden Center in Littleton, CO to get soil for our new raised beds and strawberry/other small plant beds.  We just asked the staff there for a suggestion on soil for raised beds and wouldn't you know, they have it all in one handy bag. Apparently, this is a new product so I've had a bit of trouble digging up dirt on it (ha!).  The manufacturer's website it also not very detailed.  Per the bag, EKO Raised Bed Garden Mix contains the following: EKO compost, sphagnum peat moss, fir bark, pumice, and DPW (dehydrated poultry waste).  Yup.  These were $6.99/bag. Husband did all the math on how much soil we needed.  A lot.  We needed a lot.  And this was the first trip.  I had to go back for another 15 bags.  We have started to get the soil in the various beds.  My son had a blast throwing it around and compacting it (disclaimer:  I did not know about t...

As Spring approaches, I've been toying with garden ideas for our new home.  If you recall, we have this weird "garden" around our A/C that I wanted to utilize somehow, but it seems dirty to plant vegetables in the ground around an A/C unit. Space last summer:   Ick.  No thank you.  We removed all the plants and awful split rail fence. So I started casually looking for some raised beds like this bad boy here: This bed , from Amazon.com, runs $180.  I asked my husband if he thought we could build it for cheaper, not thinking too much of it at the time.  Until I came home from a girl's day out to this: Obviously this is horrible lighting and it's not quite finished, but you get the idea. Then he built another larger, deeper bed for tomatoes:   So right now, the larger bed is in place, and the smaller bed is waiting to be leveled in, but those pesky strawberry plants are in the way.... View from front (p...