What it looked like in November:
In November we whacked a bunch of plum trees that were taking over the whole back section of yard and we had the arborist leave all the branches. Those branches are precious organic material to make new dirt with, also sort of annoying to deal with. Vim is on about getting a compost shredder and I feel like we should have to sit in the backyard and shred it all with our teeth. Vim eventually made a big berm with all the branches against the back brick wall. And Vim built a low raised bed that we bought expensive dirt for. No chickens have arrived yet.
Here is a picture from June:
everything is looking pretty janky in this picture and the lighting is weird and there is huge pile of junk in the lower left corner. The chickens are in their new penned in run, you can see a new larger raised bed on the left and some squash plants acting weird and lurking in the middle left. Nasty old Burning man rug is out in the hopes that it will start to kill the grass and we put a nice outdoor table from CB2. oh and my fluffy herb spiral is flourishing behind the table a bit.
Here is a picture from July:
We have removed the pile of junk and put the rug and table over in the lower left. so that we can get started on our cover crop plan. I can’t tell from this picture if we have already done it or not… But we did turn over all the current grass and planted a cover crop mixture plus a bunch of fava beans.
Here is the cover crop mixture I used, Green Manure Seed Mixture:
I really needed to use two packages of this per rotation.
What it looks like now:
It’s looking nice and green and fluffy in this one! We dig the cover crop in on Sept 3rd and plant another crop immediately. The front center raised bed will most likely get whacked to make way for some new McMaster-Carr insanity in the form of more huge galvanized steel troughs.
oh! I need to figure out where to put my garlic. I was inspired by the Bay Area Gardening book who said she managed some huge amount of garlic one year. I am eager to try this in our side yard. I will probably do a batch in the side yard and a batch somewhere in the back just to compare.
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Where does Jack play?
ostly he is welcome to play anywhere in the garden. When he occasional;ly tramples some plants beyond recognition i do not get too upset. It might be hard to tell from the pictures but there are tons of excellent play areas. obviously not wide open spaces where young lads can play baseball or whatever… The best spot is under the lemon tree but also jack likes to harass the chickens, find bugs, dig holes, (over) water the plants, climb the camilla and pick beans, blackberries, strawberries, tomatoes and eat them. The game we have been playing most lately is hide the lizards. We have some bright colored plastic lizards that we take turns hiding and finding. oh and behind the laundry room there is the potting bench and a shit ton of outdoor kid toys.
i know in texas the yards are massive expanses of lawn where kids run free (except when it is too hot to go outside). We drove by some houses today that had the hugest front lawns i have ever seen!!! Not so much here. if your yard isn’t on an annoying slope or is bigger than a postage stamp you are lucky!
Now that Vim has his new heavy duty welder I am hoping we can build a good metal framed playhouse over in the upper left hand corner i was kind of wanting this playhouse but i think it is already too small for him at only 40″ high.
Texas yards are stupid. It’s wasteful of land, and a waste of water on a massive scale. Most people plant shit that isn’t even a good fit for our climate. Grass itself is an awful choice for most of us here.
Just wasteful. Most everything is bigger in Texas, including our wasteful attitudeds.