I Think I'm Addicted...

to gardening.  I really need to do some laundry, and the dishes are piling up, but my mind is stuck on adding a vegetable garden to my house.  I currently garden at Husband's parents house.  They have 2 acres of land and plenty of room for me to add a vegetable garden.  I feel like I am inconveniencing them.  I may not be, but I feel like I am.  Husbands dad tills the soil, waters, adds amendments, and other things to help out.  I really appreciate it, because I can't pack the kids up and head out there everyday like I could if it were at my house.  The plan has always been to add a garden to our new house.  We just bought it a year ago and were going to wait around five years to do so.  Husband wonders why I don't just keep gardening at his parents, but says he's not the one that does it.  Our house backs up to the fence.  According to our HOA, we aren't allowed to claim the back part of our property.  We live on 1/2 an acre, but we really only get 1/4 of an acre.  This means that we have two side yards.  One is huge and fenced down to almost the front of the house.  This is where the kids play. 

The other side is only fenced down about 25 feet.  This part of the yard is not used, so I measured it all out and decided that I could use it for vegetables.  I wasn't sure if Husband would agree.  I also wanted to propose mulching that whole side yard.  I even thought up a case and had tons of pros to me stripping the grass from that whole side and turning it into a garden.

• That side of the yard is currently unused
• I can easily plant, harvest, and weed
• No need to haul the kids to his parents and try to keep an eye on them in a yard that has some dangers (piles of concrete blocks and bricks that the kids try to climb and end up falling and getting hurt, no water filled pools or buckets for the kids to drown in, I'm not sure if there are thorny or poisonous things growing there - it's a big yard, kids won't pull up all their plants, kids try to climb through their doggy door) not super dangerous or anything, but I have to keep a close eye on them which is hard to do when I'm trying to garden
• No need to mow that side of the house
• I can move plants around easily and can always change up where I'm planting

When I brought up using that side, he agreed that as long as it's enough room, that it'd be fine.  I then said, "Now I need to decide if I should try to do beds, flat or raised, or just mulch the whole thing into a garden.  Mulching the whole garden would be so much easier then keeping the rows so you can mow between them."  This is were he interrupted me.  I was so ready to convince him that mulching the whole side yard would be best and he tells me to definitely mulch the whole thing.  He doesn't want to try mowing between beds and if I want to turn the whole side yard into a grassless garden, then he votes for that because it'd be so much easier for both of us.  Whew! That was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Now I just have to figure out how to position my vegetables next year.  I don't usually do this until January, but I'm too excited.  Now I need to get back to it!  I just love gardening!

Here's everything I need to plan.  I have a drawing of the space and I made three copies of it.  I won't use the original in case I need to make more copies.  I have my garden plans from 2011, 2012, and 2014 (2013 was just tomatoes in a row with zucchini since we were in the middle of moving) and I have my garden journal. 

 

 

Already thinking about the garden

I usually go into a crazy garden planning period at the beginning of every year, but this year is especially bad. I have our new garden planned out and it shouldn't need too much tweaking. It's going to be a pretty tradition style garden but it's about double what we had at the old house. Living on a acre also allows me to plant corn. In addition to corn, I am growing: tomatoes, green beans, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, onions, broccoli (new), lettuce (new), pumpkin, bell peppers, possibly hot peppers (new), and sweet potatoes (new). I'm taking on quite a few new vegetables, so I'll need lots of luck. I'm also toying with planting strawberries or blueberries. I don't want to do too much, but I'm pretty ambitious so I'll probably do both.

We closed on our new house at the end of November and we moved in December 8th. We also had my family over for Christmas. We are still moving a few boxes over here and we have a lot of un-packing to do. Luckily we increased the size of our house by about 1000 square feet and we have lots of build-in storage here. It's a 1940's cape-cod style house. I absolutely love it! It has a lot of repairs that have to be done, but we are taking it one repair at a time. The only problem is we usually fix something just to have another thing break. Ugh!

I'm also 4 months pregnant and with all this work I'm doing, I think I'm causing myself to have some pretty strong braxton hicks. I'm trying to take it easy (not very successfully though) so we don't have to make a trip to the ER. We find out the sex on January 11th and I can't wait. I'm a little bit big for how far along I am, so I'm a little nervous with the fact that they might find two in there. I don't know if I would have the energy or money for two.