I am a list-maker and hardcore future planner. For some reason I always have been. I enjoy looking around me at the things I want to change, and then coming up with a plan on when and how to make those changes. I love to research ideas I've had, tweak plans along the way, completely invest myself in an idea just so I can suss out the weaknesses and scrap it if necessary. Sometimes I think about things for months, or even years, before I put a plan in action. But sometimes, I just jump in.
My garden this year has been a combination of those two methods. The greenhouse I plunged into headlong, well, I researched greenhouses for a week or so, and then purchased it well before I was able to build it. I guess I mean the peppers themselves. I didn't actually measure to see how many peppers I could fit in my greenhouse before I grew 19 different varieties and over 25 actual plants. The pictures I'll share with you today however, have been naggling at the back of my mind since my first garden in this house two years ago.
The people who lived here before us edged the garden areas with rocks. Which is really pretty, but sorta hard to mow around. That first year we lived here I thought how nice it would be to remove the rocks and edge with bricks, laid deep enough in the ground that I could mow right over top of them and not have to come back through with the weedwacker we don't own. I even priced out bricks. To edge the two flower beds in the backyard would cost less than $20. Then I planted tomatoes in buckets along the edge of my raised bed garden, and immediately started having weed problems. Once the tomatoes get big enough I can't move them to mow under them, so I am stuck with weeds popping up all around the tomatoes. I thought then that my brick edging idea could be nice under the tomatoes. Last year I put tomatoes next to the new green bean trellis and had even more trouble with the weeds! Bricks went back on the list of things to acquire.
This spring I turned to freecycle before I invested money into laying bricks in a rental backyard. I struck gold! A woman here in town gave me a bunch of bricks. The next day I went to Home Depot and bought black weed guard paper, soil, and some tiny pebbles. That same week I laid the first set of bricks. So far, there have been no weeds popping up yet, and I've very satisfied with the results. Now I just need to find the time to lay brick under the other three tomato areas!!
My future plans include bricking the rhubarb/asparagus/strawberry patch, edging the flower beds, and possibly bricking the space between the raised bed gardens and the side squash patch. (The first time I grew squash there they grew across that space between and I couldn't mow for the rest of the summer. It was like a mini-jungle that I had to dig through to find the zucchini!)
