Garden beginnings

Ok, so i finally finished putting in the raised beds of my vegetable garden. In fact as of now i have even planted all my seedlings, and was hoping to have planted all the seeds...but we did not get so far. I do want the kids to help with the seeds, and it was a busy yard-sale-ing type of day today.

Anyway, so i will put up some pictures. These are pictures taken before the seedlings were put in, and unfortunatly right after the maple tree dropped a million 'helicopters', they litter the place.

So i must explain myself a bit. I love tomatoes...a lot of tomatoes....a lot of heirloom tomatoes. And of course other vegetables too, i like them very much...when you decide to plant like 40-50 tomato plants though, plus lots of other stuff, in your backyard, it takes up a lot of space. And they aren't that particularly nice to look at or deal with. The standard vegetable garden is not, in general, something you would necessarily want to spend alot of time admiring. But if it takes up a third of your yard, you can't exactly ignore what it looks like.

Eventually, i found my solution to this problem when we visited the gardens at the Chateau de Villandry. The kitchen gardens (potagers) were of particular interest -- in fact i utterly dislike flowers planted in the French style. But planting vegetables this way -- in raised, shaped beds, edged with boxwoods, and beautifully-raked gravel paths allowing access to everything -- now there is an exquisite idea.

So my vegetable garden is the poor woman's version. Not enough space for a square, so i chose a rectangle. Not enough boxwoods to edge all the beds, they at present are only seedlings (supplied by my mother, thanks mom) that go around the perimeter. Can't afford pea gravel for the paths, so i used mulch. Plus it's a bitch to photograph because the perspective is all off. But you get the idea -- this is the view from the third floor balcony. You see, the beds form an ellipse.

Behind the veggie garden (and in front, but you cannot see that in the pic), there will be eventually more lawn -- it has been seeded for a week but nothing is showing up yet but a bunch of pigeons who seem to enjoy snacking on the seed. So i cannot say that my hopes for that one are particularly high...

This is the view from the second floor back window, so you can get some better idea how the whole thing works. See, i finally got that table & chairs out. The livable part of the yard essentially is that small lawn right now...you see it degenerates in the corner there and turns to construction debris.


This is the degenerate corner, as you see. It was a great victory, though, to be able to pile all this junk in one corner of the yard. Since it used to be everywhere....one day, it will all be used up, or put away, or thrown away. And the flower bed will continue around in a circle, to a shady, sheltered, green quiet nook with a bench. One day.

This is the view from the ground level. If you are very perceptive you will notice that the lines seem ever so slightly off. They are -- i would say about 5 degrees...

See, it took me hours to measure and triangulate the vegetable garden, and to make the big ellipse in the traditional way using a string and the two foci. (i am not good at measuring things exactly) And then it took me a good long time to dig out the paths and build up the beds. At this point i noticed that it was not exactly quite right, but i was not sure if it was an illusion because the right-side fence is not straight. Eventually, looking from the third floor, i could see the problem. The whole construction does not go perpendicular to the garage like it should. There is a slight angle (5, maybe 10 degrees). And this is because last year, when i first made the line (the line you can see as the line of the grass), i just eyeballed it, i did not check that it was truly perpendicular to the garage. (you can imagine that much cursing ensued upon this realization).

At this point i was not about to redo this whole thing, especially considering we might demolish the garage ANYWAY.

I have, however, been waiting for my husband to give me hell about it. His last unfortunate comment about my landscaping techniques was last year, when i just told him to buy any grass seed that said 'sun/shade mix' and he gave me a long lecture about how i needed to use exactly the same brand of the same mix throughout the lawn because otherwise it would look 'half-assed'. So certainly this particular screw-up merits even more descriptive language.