Garden Update

People have asked me to add more pictures to the blog and people keep asking about the garden, so I decided to do a follow up post about how our plants did this year with mostly pictures of vertical gardening.

 Here are the beans in front of the front window.  They cast a nice shade on the front of the house.  This system made them very easy to pick.

The beans grew all the way to the top of the strings and started looking for a place to keep growing

The pumpkins completely took over the pergola providing shade for the house and the hammock.  Check out how the pumpkins just hang there.  They didn't have any problems growing like that.  We didn't even have to support them.

 Another hanging pumpkin.  A couple of our pumpkins ripened really early.







The pumpkin seeds came from a pumpkin we had last year.  We planted 11 plants and grew 11 pumpkins.  Next year we will probably buy seeds to see if we can get more out of each plant.








Pumpkins on the roof.  Look at all that shade.  The vines didn't like growing on the black asphalt shingles.  They kept turning back towards the pergola and hanging down in the middle of the walkway.  I had to keep putting them back up on the pergola.

Here you can see the beans in front of the window, the pumpkin covered pergola with zucchini in the front as well as the salvaged countertop pavers.  The beans are sparse in the middle because a large rain storm came just after we planted washing away the seeds so many of the beans didn't germinate.








A view of the front yard from the street.  The tomatoes ended up growing well over the top of the t-frames.  We canned enough spaghetti sauce and ketchup for the entire year.

Reclaimed Countertop Scraps

Again, it’s been a while since posting last, but here I am again. As you will see in the next few posts I have been very busy. In the Mitleider method of gardening it is important to minimize the amount of non vegitable life in the garden. This is mainly talking about bugs and weeds. The way to accomplish this is by weeding and pruning regularly and by not watering in-between the isles of crops. Because my garden is in the front yard where it is constantly under the scrutiny of anyone passing by, I decided that I didn’t want to have just plain dirt between my grow boxes. So, this is what I came up with:

I went around to several stone countertop manufacturers and picked the scraps out of their dumpsters. I did ask all of them of course (some not at first.) I used the scraps as pavers in-between the grow boxes. Because I am a glass fanatic, I put a mixture of different colored crushed recycled glass between the pieces. What you have as an end result is a beautiful, bug and weed resilient yard.

This process takes many, many, many hours. Each piece is a different thickness and has to be set and leveled individually. I didn’t cut any of them and just trusted that I would find one that fit. It was worse than a huge puzzle.