The Nifty Foodie's Life

We’ve been living in the new house for a little over a  year now. Our house is anything but a fixer upper, like our last one was, but there were some things I really wanted to spruce up around our little abode. Our front yard was one of these things.

While the old homeowners took fantastic care of their house, I found that the front yard was kind of boring, though…lots of iris and amaryllis bulbs. I tried to add a little color in, but a bunch of annuals can only do so much to a space. (pardon the finger in this one)

We needed to do something a little more drastic, so I asked my mom (horticulturist extraordinaire) to draw up a little design for our yard.

I honestly thought it would take a day of work, tops. However, little did I know how much work reshaping a landscape involved! In fact, H did most of the reshaping, because as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t dig grass out as efficiently as H. It took us almost a week to finish it all (hey, we have to work too, you know…), but we got it done.

After multiple trips to Home Depot and Lowes, as well as hours of digging/spreading/planting, here’s our new front yard!

Isn’t it just awesome? The picture really doesn’t do it justice, though. I love that the only things I’ll have to replant are the annuals along the border (vs. when I had them throughout), as well as the annuals around the trees. MUCH easier, in my opinion. I can’t wait to see how these shrubs/bushes look when they grow a little more, too! It was a bit of a splurge for all of these plants, but it’s sort of an investment, since most of these shrubs/bushes are gonna stick around for years to come.

Let’s just hope I remember to keep everything watered….I tend to forget than plants need it. I didn’t get my mom’s green thumb…at all.

It’s been a little over a month since we planted our square foot gardens. It’s not growing as quickly as I would have thought, but at least things aren’t dying. The biggest surprise is the green bean plants (top right). Those were the only plants from seed and they seem to be thriving and flowering like crazy!

Now, the soil blend for a square foot garden is really lightweight. I noticed a while back that I really can’t climb in the garden to pick weeds (we’ve only had two weeds this whole month, by the way) or my whole foot will pretty much sink in the dirt. :-\ Well, Millie just realized that lizards are loving the veggie garden, and when there are lizards, Millie goes nuts. 4 perfect dents in my garden (from her paws), because of a dang lizard. Ugh…dog. At least she hasn’t killed anything.

Now, it’s taken a month, but I’m super happy to see ‘mater babies. Grow ‘maters grow!

I’m also seeing quite a few peppers growing. This is the largest bell pepper I have so far, and it’s eventually supposed to turn yellow.

So far, I’m loving the square foot garden idea. Barely any weeds, no bugs and it’s SO much easier to water. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this garden this Summer!

 The past two weekends have consisted of hardware stores, dirt, flowers, sore legs and smashing tons of bugs that would attempt to crawl on me. It has been tiring, for sure, but when Spring hits, I just get an itch to beautify everything outside.

Last weekend, we noticed our neighbors were fixing up their front beds, and we thought it would probably be best to start with that, since that’s what everyone sees when they drive by the house, and that would take the least amount of time.

2 azaleas and a bunch of begonias/petunias/zinnias later? I think our front yard garden is pretty fantastic looking, if I do say so myself! (We already had a ton of iris/amaryllis bulbs in the garden, as well as 2 indian hawthorne bushes we bought last Fall.)

The rest of the weekend, we cleared some old bushes in the backyard and also built a small shed (from a kit) in the back (that was mostly H, actually). It came out pretty cute, actually.

This past weekend, my big project was finally installing our square foot gardens. I purchased 2 of these kits at our local Sam’s Club, because the kits had raving reviews and for $40 (in store price) for a double raised garden? It wasn’t too shabby!

The only bummer about those kits is the double garden size is 3.5 ft. x 7 ft. So, two 3.5 ft. x 3.5 ft. gardens. Not an exact foot measurement, but eh, I think I made it work. I do love that these kits assembled super easily (no screws, nails or anything) and the materials are pretty darn heavy (sturdy).

We decided to fill the gardens with Mel’s Mix, which we made on our own. We purchased the vermiculite at a local nursery ($29 /4 cu. feet, which beat the heck out of $20/2 cu. feet at Home Depot) and the compost/peat moss at Lowes (compost was $3/2 cu. feet and peat moss was $10/3 cu. feet).  We mixed everything in a wheelbarrow a few cu. feet at a time, and it really didn’t take too long to mix it that way. It ended up costing us $110 to fill up 2 kits with the soil mix, which really wasn’t that shabby!

Here’s one bed filled. You might notice the cardboard below the kit. That’s not only to prevent weeds/grass from growing in the bed, but also to provide the drainage the garden needs (since paper is porous). Coincidentally, we were able to use the box from the shed kit. The front and back of the box were the perfect size to place the garden kits on top of.

Once that was done, I placed the veggies in the garden to get the spacing right. Then, I just dug holes with my hands (yeah, no hand shovel needed…this soil mix is SUPER light and easy to dig into) and placed the veggies in the garden! Here’s the first kit done…

And…here’s the second kit done! After everything was planted, I gave the garden a good soaking with the sprinkler.

 I’m way excited to see what our garden produces this year. I’m hoping we have better luck with the square foot garden vs. just planting veggies in the ground.

Here’s what’s in our garden (so far…we still have some room to plant a few more things):

• creole tomatoes
• cherry tomatoes
• heirloom tomatoes
• sweet basil (and also a purple basil, which should make for a really cool pesto)
• green, yellow and purple bell peppers
• bush pickle cucumbers
• jalapeno peppers
• poblano peppers
• cucumbers
• chives
• dill

Have you started on the ol’ Spring yard work yet? What are you up to in your gardens this year?

Spring always gets me in an excited mood to pretty things up around the house. The bright colors, fresh air, sunny skies…I wish all four seasons were Spring! Our garden is one of the larger projects that we work on when Spring starts, and man, this year was our biggest year to date!

In the past, we didn’t really make a budget. I just bought some 6 pack annuals, a few bags of mulch, some veggies and called it a day! However, when June would hit, those annuals would fizzle, our garden was just a nightmare to take on with the weeds, and the veggies…oh, don’t get me started on the veggies.

This year, we made a budget and a plan, which included plants that would come back year after year and could easily take on our crazy summer heat! Our house has three main gardens: the front yard, the side of the house and the back yard (if you even consider what we have a back yard lol).

Our front garden is the typical “pretty” garden. Flowers, pretty bushes, a fountain…gotta have curb appeal.  I blogged about our struggle with one area of the front garden. Sago palms + doggie? No…

Our side garden became a huge project that me, Joey and my Mom took on right after Hurricane Gustav hit a few years ago. We ended up losing power for over a week, so the house was very uncomfortable to stay in, but ironically, outdoors was much more pleasant for the first few days, so we took on this project. Before, the old homeowners filled it with dirt and landscape rocks (the large ones). When we started digging things up, we actually discovered they tried to put a pond in there, left a few random knick-knacks and all sorts of weird stuff….ugh. We decided this garden was just a huge undertaking, so we ended up filling in the dirt, completely mulching it and place plants in large pots on top of the mulch. Luckily for us, the old homeowners left a few rustic looking freebie pots, so, we used those for this garden!

I think it looks spectacular, and it’s a fun place to put a few random garden signs.

Our back garden is primarily a veggie garden. I’ve learned a good bit the past two years with having a veggie garden. The biggest change this year is that there will be no ‘maters in our veggie garden. I’m willing to pay regular price for those precious creole ‘maters or steal a few from my Dad, who is a ‘mater growing pro! Those bugs were disgusting, and I never want to deal with them again! Instead, I’m planting pickle cucumbers, along with bell, poblano and jalapeno peppers. This is my first time growing cucumbers, and peppers have done really well in our gardens, especially in the summer, so I’m very optimistic about what this harvest will bring!

We also have our baby meyer lemon tree. I got the tree last year for my birthday, and man, that thing is flowering like crazy! I’m super excited to see what this winter’s harvest will bring!

Also, just for kicks…here’s the dog who thinks fresh mulch is the coolest thing since Beggin’ Strips. I literally have to take mulch out of her mouth every time we go outside. She seriously wants to eat it. Agh..oh well, she’s cute.

What do you love about Spring?

November has been an awesome month as far as days off go. My office had off for Election Day, Veterans’ Day and we’ll also have off for Turkey Day, as well as Black Friday!

I decided since the weather was so gorgeous on Veterans’ Day, it was time to dig in the dirt a little bit and revamp our front yard garden.

And no, there are no before pictures. Just imagine LOTS of weeds leftover from the end of the Summer and dying Spring annuals.

Yes, I’m 5’10″ and have size small hands. I’m all out of whack.

I decided to plant some perennials in front of our azaleas this time around. The annuals I bought were getting on my nerves and they weren’t tall enough to see from the road. However, I couldn’t avoid these bouquet dianthus when I saw them in the nursery. Aren’t they so cute?

The perennials I decided upon? Lantanas! They are so pretty and will attract butterflies in years to come!

As for these little flowers (more dianthus)? These are going to go perfectly in the pots by the front door.

Have you done any Fall gardening?