Our "Yarden" so far.

I wanted to do a quick post about what's happening in the yard and garden this year.
I'll get it all down here while I rest my aching back and sip a nice cold cherry limeade

Make one for yourself. I'll wait. Feel free to sub a little cherry flavored syrup for the rum if you like. ;)
Sooo...due to the HOA rules around these parts, we weren't able to have a nice big square foot garden like I wanted to have. So we settled for a little one here at home. Tucked neatly outside our family room window. I call it "the small garden".
Here it is on July 4th, about 5 weeks after we planted it. This is after I pinched off a bowl full of greens. Chicken wire protects it from the deer who visit.

And our first harvest of greens. Spinach and mesclun mix. Also one little radish that I pulled just to see if they were ready. I'm terrible about having faith that something is growing where I can't see it! lol

A week later I pulled the rest of the radishes. They were crisp and spicy and delicious!

I was able to go to the small garden and pick a salad for dinner another time or two. One night we had only appetizers for dinner. The basil for our caprese salad and greens for a citric balsamic dressed salad came from our garden. It was so yummy!

Yesterday I pulled out the rest of the spinach and greens. I got a half of a gallon bag of spinach and a full gallon of the mesclun mix greens. We'll enjoy those this week!

And now our small garden looks like this.

The carrots are coming along slowly. I think I didn't thin them out enough. On the left in the back we have a red cherry tomato plant...determinate...and a yellow pear tomato plant, indeterminate and attempting to take over the world! In front of those there is a row of beets that I planted just to see if the seeds from last year were still good. They are! So I pluck a few leaves off of those to add to our salads too.
I replanted spinach, mesclun mix and radishes in the empty squares today, so we should get another good round of salads before the first frost.
The small garden is just basically a snacking/salad garden for us to enjoy here at home.
My neighbor friends talked me into joining the community garden in our city. It's about 5 or 6 miles away. Traditional row gardening, I MUCH prefer square foot gardening. $40 for a 10 X 20 foot space. Oh boy! I was skeptical. I don't love heat. The thought of having to make the extra effort to get in the car and go to a different place to care for a garden wasn't super appealing to me. But I knew I wanted to GROW SOMETHING and eat it so I signed up. And here is our little rented, closest one on the left, space when I first saw it in May.

I was sick as a dog with some kind of plague in May. Luckily the weather was slow to realize that it was supposed to be planting time so by the time I was well and the weather was cooperating, it was the end of May and we planted!
A rough list -
12 roma tomato plants
12 pepper plants (red, yellow, PURPLE, habanero, jalapeno, hot banana)
1 cucumber plant - I forget the type. something that is supposed to stay smallish. I was freaked out about planting vine-y things that would block the trenches and then the water flow to the plots below us.)
a whole row of beets
a whole row of bush beans
okra - I've never grown okra before and it was a full six weeks before I could clearly distinguish between the weeds and the okra starts.
onions
garlic

My hope is to grow most, if not all, of the ingredients necessary to make enough homemade salsa to last us till next year. Fingers crossed! We are completely out of what I made last fall.
Here's how the "big garden" looked on July 4th.

I was still skeptical. The ground is hard as a rock. Just awful. you have to water first to be able to pull weeds. And the weeds are INSANE!!! ugh!
But we kept going. Have to give it our best try to know if we will want to do it again next year or put a fence around our yard at home and have a few grow beds there. (expensive!) So we kept at it. A couple of hours of weeding each week. Maybe that's not a lot? It seems like a LOT compared to the square foot method. Our small garden has had exactly ONE weed this whole summer.
Roger and I went to the garden today to stake up our tomato plants and pull MORE weeds. And we had a very satisfying surprise.
A few hot banana peppers were ready to harvest.
And about a pound of beans!

But the big surprise was the beets! I knew they were getting close but you know how I am about things I can't see growing under the ground. LOL
This is just about 1/3of the row.

I cooked about half of them as soon as we got home. They are soooo good! I'm so excited that I'm going to plant another row in the next day or two. After all, I have those seeds from last year that are still usable. And I'll plant some carrots and radishes where I'm pulling up this row of beets over the next week or two. So fun!
So here's the big garden today, after we weeded and harvested.

I meant to take a picture of the entire community garden area to show the WAIST HIGH weeds. ugh! But I forgot.
I know it's getting pic LOADED in here but I'm gonna go on. I won't blame you if that cherry limeade is all gone and you're getting restless and moving on. ;)
Before I get to the yard stuff, here are a few close ups of the garden

Fully loaded tomato plants.

Cucumber plant with teeny tiny prickly little baby cucumbers. Yay!

And a PURPLE bell pepper. *squeeeeeeal!* I tried to grow purple peppers once before with far less success. But this one looks great!

And the okra plants have some tiny sort of triangular shaped points on the plants that might be okra pods! I don't know. I've never done this before. Guess we'll see. :)

Well, that's where we're at right now! It'll be fun to see what happens throughout the rest of the summer.
Who knows...we might just do it again next year!
Maybe it's like childbirth and by next Spring we will have forgotten how hard it was and just be excited to do it again.
Even though we can't have a big garden here at home, we're still growing things.
At the old house, I thought it was fun to have pictures of the trees we planted when we planted them and again years later for comparison. So I dragged Roger out for some pictures today and Jaxon was happy to tag along.
These are the Bradford pears that the builder planted last year.

Jaxon is standing next to a little evergreen shrub that Roger planted this year.
Here's a Japanese Maple planted this Spring. We hope it will grow to shade a little bit of the sun we get from the south. Because we really like sitting on the front porch. But I have that issue with heat. ;)

In the backyard we planted a Mimosa. We had one in the old house that was in memory of the baby we lost and I was sad to leave it behind. So it was high on the list of trees we wanted to plant here.

And we love the purplish pink flowers on Eastern redbuds in the Spring.

We also planted a maple tree this year but we've had a drainage problem in that corner of the yard and it has died. We'll replace it soon and I'll plug the picture in here.
We bought a big pot for the front porch too. After more than two decades of filling pots with pretty annuals every Spring and then watching them shrivel up and die because of my aversion to heat, we decided to fill it with succulents instead. And I love it! They're even blooming! I wasn't really expecting that. We only have to water it once a week and it's thriving on my neglect.

Click the above picture. You've GOT to see all the interesting colors and textures up close. I love it!
That's all that's been growing on around here lately. ;)