A Lovely Little Garden

I'm really working hard on making my little yard into the prettiest garden I can. Living in a townhouse, I have a small yard with a patio area, which unfortunately doesn't leave much room for planting pretty things and growing yummy food. I'm trying to be very creative in how I manage the space because I would like to grow as much of my own food as possible, as well as have room for little bursts of color that make me happy. I started my garden last year not long after I moved in, and planted some Bee Balm, a Daylily, Bleeding Heart (my favorite!), some Pansies and some chives and parsley in a planter box. I had also begun upside down gardening which was a first for me, but with my little space I thought I'd give it a try. I grew cherry tomatoes and cucumbers last summer and they turned out wonderfully! If you are tight on space I highly recommend upside down gardening. It is super easy and we had so many tomatoes and cucumbers to eat. My Mom, who is an avid gardener and knows her stuff, couldn't believe how big my cucumber plant was and how much it was yielding. This year I'm doing Beefsteak tomatoes, cucumber again and will be trying zuchini which I read does very well upside down.

Tomorrow I'm going to do some work in the yard and hopefully will have things finished by the end of the week. I'm going to be building an above ground garden bed and will be picking up the supplies for that (simple 2"x10" pieces of wood and some screws) but first I need to dig out the area where that will go. I also need to dig out some small unruly bushes that are taking up valuable space in the corner of my yard and will put my new composter there. I will of course cut up the bushes I dug up and those will be used to start my compost. Once that is all done I will prep everything for the autumn planting season, which will hopefully be a little truer to a typical autumn than our summer has been to a typical summer. We finally hit 20 degrees celcius today and the sun made an appearance. It was magical. We have hardly had any sun this past month and it has been a little depressing. I'm hoping the sun is here to stay, at least for a while. My garden hopes so too.