Gardens take a long time to come together. Especially if you’re working on them a piece at a time to spread out the cost. And because of that, I think it’s really easy to become focused on what hasn’t been done yet or what hasn’t matured yet, rather than what you’ve accomplished. I find myself doing that all the time. I’ll see the privacy plantings that haven’t quite grown together yet, the fruit trees that haven’t started producing yet or a bare patch that I haven’t gotten around to planting. And in doing so, I’ll completely overlook how far we’ve come already.

So, I thought it would be fun to look at some before and afters of our garden, to show you where we started and where we’re at now. And to remind myself of the same.

Ready to dive into some before and after photos?

When we bought our house almost 11 years ago, it had four dying azaleas in the front yard and nothing else. We didn’t have any money to spare, so it stayed like that until 2009.

A local garden center had a promotion where they’d draw up a landscape design for your yard for $250, and then refund the $250 once you spent a certain amount on plants and materials (I think it was $1,000). We took advantage of that deal; made a bunch of tweaks to the design, and then hired some friends to help us landscape the front yard.

Here’s how it looks now. The new sidewalk and changes to the house came later.

Landscaping gets expensive, so we worked on our yard a section at a time. And that proved to be a good thing. By the time we got around to the backyard, I had decided that I wanted to focus on edibles, and so I redid our landscape design completely. [Read more…]

July is nearly over, so I thought I’d take a minute to show you how things are going in my garden.

Last time I shared garden pictures, I didn’t think my pepper plants were doing all that well. Looks like they decided to show me. These are the tallest pepper plants that I’ve ever had, and they are absolutely covered in peppers and flowers. We had a yard sale a couple weekends ago, and people couldn’t stop talking about them.

A couple of our tomato plants broke while we were on vacation &#150 we’re talking nearly-snapped-in-half-broke – but somehow they’ve continued to thrive. We haven’t had any ripe tomatoes yet, but it shouldn’t be much longer.

Our pumpkin vines have really taken off. This is a picture of just one of our plants, and it’s only what I was able to fit in the picture!

Aren’t the leaves gorgeous?

I pulled the onions after they died back, and now I have them curing in the treehouse. The drying rack that my father-in-law gave me this spring has been put to good use.

Lenny, the lemon tree, has had a great first season. Check out those lemons!

This is the first year our apple trees have bared fruit, so we won’t have many apples to pick, but I’m pleased with the size of the apples.

Netting the grapes has kept the birds off of them (even our five hungry chickens), and so far we aren’t having any problems with Japanese Beetles. Fingers crossed that we’ll have our first grape harvest this fall.

How’s your garden doing? I’d love to hear about it.

I ran out between storms today to snap some pictures of my garden. Here’s a look at what’s going on out there:

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