My Supplications: Summer Garden

My husband was busy this Spring!

This is a small picture of his backyard garden. Pennie's strolling between the rows of potato bushes.

So, I think a bit of the evolving history of our backyard is in order for this post, don't you??

We've lived in this house since 2001. We did move up North in 2009, but we came back in 2011.

Our backyard, by city standards, is good sized. We have a large cement area back there where the original owners parked an RV for years. To my knowledge, we are only the 3rd owners of this house, which was built back in 1960. The cement area, as you can imagine, is pretty long, stretching from our back door to the alley.

Adjacent to the cement was a grass area with a 50 foot tall horse chestnut tree in the middle. In years past, we loved the shade and put a swing in the tree for the kids. We did notice that it was awfully hard to grow plants and flowers back there due to the lack of shade, because the tree was laden with dense foliage and it was pretty hard for any sun to get in. We did container gardens one year, but it was super hard to find the time to keep that going every year, and the kids were growing up and the container gardens were barely providing enough vegetables for one meal for all of us….

Several years ago we got our first dog. She was an Australian Blue Heeler and we got her when she was a puppy. We also learned that horse chestnuts are poisonous to dogs!! Also, Gracie (the dog) was really active and she felt the need to pace and so, she wore the grass out in the backyard, as dogs do…and we were left with an ugly, bare patch of dirt!

In 2009 we moved up North and got a huge greenhouse. Dave was brand new in the garden world, and our greenhouse was perfect for our Northwest weather, and it was a really nice greenhouse.

We lived up North for two years and through events and clear prompting, we knew that the Lord was leading us back here, so we packed up in one weekend and moved back to this house in 2011.

Dave had gotten pretty good at growing things by then, but the greenhouse was waaaay too big for our backyard! What to do???

Alas, we decided to cut down that horse chestnut tree and make the grass area of our backyard a garden plot.

We have the wood from that tree stacked along the cement area, and we use it in our tiny homemade fire pit.

Today, three years after we moved back, Dave is an expert gardener and has found that it really is his first love. I cannot take a single iota of credit for any of the things you see in the following pictures….I'm so proud of him and our garden is so so so beautiful and lush right now! We use the "Back To Eden" method of gardening. I encourage you, if you aren't familiar with this method, look it up on Youtube. It will open your eyes and really change and revolutionize the way you garden! Plus, it's the easiest thing in the world!

Every Spring, we take a little trip to our favorite tiny local garden center and get organic, non-GMO seeds. I get to choose a lot of what we grow, and Dave gets to choose the rest and he's in charge of planting. The girls are pretty good about helping. Last year, we saved a bunch of seeds from our harvest and we planted those this year.

So, here's what we've got coming up back there right now:

*Corn

*Potatoes

*Sweet Peppers

*Yellow Squash

*Sugar Snap Peas

*Green Beans

*Tomatoes, both cherry and regular

*Carrots, different colors and varieties

Here are pictures of the garden, taken yesterday by Daughter #1, Hannah….

Although they're hard to see, the plants wrapped in pink saran wrap are peppers. On one side of the peppers you can see the green beans and on the other side you can see a bit of the tomatoes.

To the left, those bushes are potatoes. To the right of the potatoes, you can see the sugar snap peas, which are Lucie's favorite!

These are our tomatoes. We have one golden cherry tomato plant. The rest are large heirloom tomatoes. The surrounding wooden structures were built by my husband.