Urban Oasis

The Orchard. We lost a few trees over the winter that Darren replaced this spring.

Here are the photos of the yard, as promised. Darren has just done a phenomenal amount of  work to turn this greenspace into our space! He spends hours & hours every weekend working on the yard, whether it is weekly maintenance or working on projects. This man has made our yard as much of our home as any room in the house. I am really proud of him!

Here is the "completed" garden. There's still a lot to be done before we achieve our final vision, but the beds are (mostly) built and filled and planting has begun. Darren spent part of last weekend building tomato cages and he plans to sink poles and create a climbing fence for cucumbers and squash along the back beds. In the photo below, you can see the berry bushes that he has planted around the beds. He has planted blueberry, blackberry, raspberry and currant bushes around several of the beds. He will enclose these bush beds with rounded boards.

Several months ago, Darren built a compost pile behind the shed. I LOVE composting! I am a big believer in conservation, and though we were already recycling more waste than we tossed, we are now throwing away even less because we are adding (appropriate) food waste to the compost pile instead of throwing it in the trash can. We are now only producing about one (30 gal.) garbage can of trash every 3-4 weeks with all the rest of our waste being recycled or composted. We will also get the benefit of producing nutrient-rich compost for our garden beds!

This is the area between the fruit trees and the fire pit. We only recently cleared it of a large pile of wood chips & soil. I would love for Darren to create a natural play area for the kids using part of this space. We have a large pile of logs, some of which are quite large, that I think we could use to make a nice climbing area. I would also like to add a pebble pit, and we have already been looking at that big, horizontal branch to build a lookout platform. Another thing that we need to do is get our well up & running so that we can run a line back to the garden for the summer months. There is always something to do!