This was only my second year gardening, and first year with my own yard 😤 Everything is in containers. I struggled a lot with figuring out a good place to put containers that got enough sunlight. I was trying to avoid the front yard because I was worried about car exhaust and grossness getting onto veggies, but when I finally caved and moved everything to the front it started growing much much better. Lots of things also got chomped by deer and groundhogs in the backyard. I had hoped that big containers would keep the groundhogs out but I caught one climbing up onto the top and eating all the seedlings. Lots of failures, lots of dead plants. I tried to plant some native flowers in the backyard hoping to get them to spread to the empty lot behind us, but no success. A lot of seeds got eaten by birds.
I had better luck with both veggie and flower starts that I bought from the local farmer’s market. I was SO CLOSE to getting sunflowers, the flower heads were coming out but then we had a big windy thunderstorm that knocked them over and they got all crispy after :( My only harvest this year are a couple of jalapeno peppers. I didn’t start anything indoors this year, but I definitely see the value in it now and I’m hoping to get a rack with grow lights set up over the winter.
What about you guys??
Health problems have been acting up, so my yard has become an untamed jungle. The birds are pleased.
Sounds like habitat restoration to me 😁
That’s basically what I’ve been doing with my yard, but I prefer it to be at least slightly maintained…
Yeah, my yard too, so after two years of letting the native plants come back I am now finding several types of seedling trees which has me struggling with a new set of ethical conundrums on what to do about that, because a lot of these new baby trees are growing too close to the house (don’t want them dropping limbs or worse falling over, one day, onto my home) and also growing into my drainage field and/or blocking sunlight that I desperately need where I container garden on my porch.
I also now have a slew of a certain type of weedy plant that grows massively tall and bushy, that are getting too big and too close to the stairs of my home, plus all kinds of vining poison oak/ivy/sumac encroaching on the house, that I never noticed before, because it was my spouse who use to always mow our lawn, but that I’m now realizing had always kept it at bay. And also one native grape vine, that again, I had no idea existed where it is, because the spouse would mow over it, but now it’s grown into a giant mound of five feet around and almost as tall and it’s sent out long vines and trying to grow over and choke out a small crepe myrtle I planted two years ago.
Here’s some thanks for considering the birds, and my hope that you’re feeling well again before long so you can play in the garden.
My garden got away from me, too. I’m totally overworked at the moment and never got around to putting anything in. It’s a gigantic mess of weeds, thistles, volunteer flowers, overgrown herbs etc. It’s crawling with bees and insects and birds.
Wu wei