Garden Days

We're slowly making our backyard a place where we enjoy sitting out and relaxing in. These past few weekends, while the weather has been so beautiful, we've been working on beautifying our little space.

First, we decided to double our gardening space this year! We figured out where we wanted to put our new beds, S. and I scraped away all the gravel, we went to Home Depot to buy the wood, came home and got busy!

Mark and S. put together the beds and brought the irrigation to our new beds all last weekend. On Friday, they delivered 3 yards of soil. Today, we went to the nursery and bought some plants and came home and planted them. :)  Such a wonderful sense of accomplishment to get it all done. :)  We've started with fewer plants than we have had in the past. We may add more to this but for now, we're good with this amount. It seems like we always over buy and the plants get so crowded!

Here's our garden for this year. :)

New Beds

A., S., and R. planting tomatoes

Tomatoes

 Green beans and a lonely watermelon plant

Planters

Mint from last year (such an invasive little bugger!)

 Tomato and some herbs

Zucchini 

We also have some planters on our back patio that I wanted to utilize more this year for cooking. 

Lettuce 

Leftover thyme from last year, basil and swiss chard

This planter had a mixture planted in it from last year. We have shamrock, that's coming back from a year ago! Chives from last year and the remains of our basil plant (the wood). I added some Swiss Chard because I didn't know where else to put it! :)

In our old home I had an arbor that I just loved. It had become part of the landscaping so when we moved, I had to leave it there. :(  Recently I found another arbor at Hobby Lobby that I thought would look nice in our new backyard. :)  It went on sale this past weekend and Mark gave his blessing to purchase it. :)  When we placed it in the back, over by our gardening area, S. had a great idea of grabbing our bistro table and chairs from the front yard and moving them over to sit in front of the arbor. 

New arbor w/ bistro table and chairs

As you can see, we need some more landscaping to make the place a little more cozy, but I think S. had a great idea. Can you imagine the arbor w/ some climbing flowering plants, a little shade tree off to the side and sitting there w/ your favorite beverage and a great book to read? It's a great location w/ some awesome views of our yard. 

The next spot we beautified is the gate that goes between our neighbors backyard and ours. We put the gate in when we moved in so the kids could go back and forth easily. There's a little speak easy cut into the gate so they can see if we're out and come over to play.  Love the idea of the gate but, the gate was just ick. LOL It's a pretty cheap gate that the painters never stained and is already showing a lot of wear after just over a year of being installed. Everytime I'd look over in that part of the yard, which has absolutely nothing in it, I would try to think of a way to make that area look a little happier and brighter.  I came up with the idea of adding a window box w/ flowers (fake!) under the speak easy. Once that was up, I grabbed our "W" from our old house and put it above the little cut out. And here's the results!

My "new" gate! Didn't it turn a rather drab gate into something fun?

S. and Mark set the pavers a few weeks ago, in anticipation of our garden. The bunnies were coming in from under the gate. Can't have that w/ fresh lettuce and other goodies newly planted! I like the way they look and think it would look even better extending them out a little bit more. Think they'll agree? Yeah, probably not. LOL

That's how we've been spending our last few weekends!  The next project is to string some fun lights around our patio. When we get that done, I'll post more pictures.

Hope you've enjoyed our beautification project! :)  How have you made your space a little brighter and happier?