Up until May, it felt like the landscape of our garden changed daily. In May , it feels like we have settled down a bit. While we are still adding features, plants, and debating even more, May was more a month for planting and growing. And best of all, for our first harvests!
Right at the beginning of the month we got a dirt delivery and in our style put it on the front lawn. I highly recommend anyone with the space, who is building a garden of any kind, to have dirt delivered. The delivery fee often seems high, but the lack of plastic, not having to go to any big box stores, and that you can know where the dirt comes from is totally worth it. We really struggled with getting bags of dirt for many reason, so this is a great alternative. And you are supporting local businesses not corporations!!
I’ve never put the garden in a before and after picture here, side by side. I thought that would be great for this post, since so much has changed from the beginning of May to the end.
In the first picture above, our first backyard bed was just planted with tomatoes and peas at the start of May. Towards the end we have moved some things around, added flowers for pollinators, our peas are blossoming, and everything has grown. You can see in the second pic above that we have a new bed that we made at the end of April and filled with our dirt delivery. We made this bed form a cabinet that was in our basement when we bought the house.
In the two pictures above, we have our “lettuce bed” when we first planted it with baby plants from a local market, our over wintered spinach and red onion. Next we have it really filling out, with more lettuce to replace those the squirrels ate.
We continually seed our “radish bed” so that we have radishes growing in all stages. We put some potatoes in that bed and purple cauliflower as well. Our raspberries live right next door and they have grown tons over the month. I’m unconvinced if we will get berries. I’m pretty sure the birds and squirrels will eat them before we do, if berries arrive.
Another addition we made in late April was to add a little bed for just flowers. We repurposed an old drawer (which we had previously urban foraged as a shelf), and put any and all wild flower seeds we had in it. This year we are concentrating on using up old seeds which may or may not be viable. By the end of May, quite a few of the seeds had come up.
No before pics of the front beds this time. In the original front bed, the orange thyme is going bananas, we’ve put tomatoes bc they do so well there, flowers for pollinators, and a flower that we planted last year is coming back up. The herb bed, below, has new basil from the local market and we planted a bunch of herb seeds. We are waiting to see if they come up.
We added another bed in the front as well, but haven’t planted anything in it by the end of May. Now we have 3 beds plus a few pots in the front yard. We have 9 beds in the back (two of which are blueberries and one for wildflowers). We have many many pots in the back yards as well as a place for raspberries. In June we hope to plant and tend but I don’t think we will add more beds. We have other projects planned, tho!
In May we ate herbs, radishes, lettuce, kale, snap peas, and spinach, from the garden. The bluebs are bluing and there are many so we are hoping to eat some soon. There are blossoms on the tomatoes and almost blooms on the peppers. We are sooo excited to eat more in June.
Are you keeping a garden this year? What style do you have (raised bed, in the ground, container, windowsill)?