Mission Creep... Garden Style

Garden at the beginning of May

Garden with all three beds as of last week

My goal for 2013 was to have a few garden beds in the part my yard between the driveway and my neighbor's property. The plan for the garden this year was to have three beds with corn, green beans, squash, and herbs. By the beginning of May, I had one bed with a handful of plants - mostly tomatos and pepper plants. I thought I was making good progress, but  another two weeks passed by before I was able to complete the latter two beds. Unlike the first bed that contains store bought plants, the second and third beds contain plants that were started from seed. The second bed contains squash plants that were started a few weeks earlier and some green beans from seed. The third bed contains corn and green beans. My parents have already threatened to steal corn and green beans from my garden. (Grrr...) In the first bed, I added some more tomato plants and a couple of basil plants. So the initial garden plan has been completed and I just have to tend the garden as the plants grow.

Starting seeds, part 2

I will not lie that the size of my garden has expanded beyond my initial plan. Part of this was due to the sad fact that the first set of seeds I started in late March/early April were no good to plant out because they had received too much light. The epicotyls of each of the seedlings were much too long and did not look healthy. This is part of the reason why I had bought plants for the first bed. That and I was impatient in having a fuller plant in the garden/  A few weeks before building the two latter beds, I had started some plants to plant in those beds. The result of the second try were a good number of seedlings; more seedlings that I had space to plant out, which left me with the problem of what to do with the extra seedlings.


The other reason why my garden plan expanded was the unplanned removal of the azalea bushes (wall) in front of our house. When we moved into the house I thought that they looked pretty, but after the blooms finished I didn't really like the way they looked. Also, the bushes were overgrown and I didn't want to work that much on them to trim them back and train them. So after talking with a coworker who offered to take them off my hands, the azaleas were gone. That left all of the bare spots in our yard to figure out what we were going to do.

Front walk way before and after

Beets, radishes, lettuce, and herb

Since I had extra seedlings, I figured, why not plant them in the front of the house. As Aaron would remind me, this decision was a classic case of mission creep. And the mission creep did not end there as I had also started a bunch of container gardens full of veggies and herbs too.

I'm really hoping to get some tasty produce out of my suburban experiment.