Tag Archives: gardening

Yard Work

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by Woodsbum

Well, I have started my yard work projects that will include building a small herb and medicinal plant garden. This last weekend I had to replace the fence between myself and my neighbor to the back of my house. We did about 70 feet of “good neighbor” fencing, build a retaining wall to level his property and also dug up two huge stumps on my side so that I can start gardening a bit. I will have to set a new retaining wall around the tree in the corner as well as a fence to keep the dogs out. It should be nice.

Now I have to plan ahead to figure out how I want to build the wall and fence. If I use railroad ties there is a potential for the chemicals in the ties to mess up the fragile plants that I want to grow. This may require me to build myself something out of stone and set fencing around it. If I use cinder blocks, I can set the fence posts inside the blocks, thus making it stronger and less of a need to go to a taller fence to keep the dogs out. I may look at that as a possible method.

Now for the plants, I really want to do some serious research before I just go all “plant” crazy. There are definite things that I will have to look at such as medicine qualities, climate in which the plant grows best, etc. I also don’t want my plants to end up taking over the entire area so I will need to make sure that none of them start acting like blackberries either.

If anyone has any good suggestions for plants that will grow well in the PNW, let me know.

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Beginning Gardening

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by Evil Jackalope

Hello gardeners, future gardeners and Woodsbum’s Mom. To give a brief introduction of the gardening section of this blog, my mission is to document my gardening season for the year and share some tips that have helped me be successful in growing vegetables. In no way am I a master gardener or claim to be, I just know what has worked and what hasn’t worked for me in the past. Most importantly, I do this all while living in the suburbs.

To give a quick background description, this will be my 5th year gardening. The first year I just literally picked up plants from True Value and stuck them straight in the ground. Surprisingly, I had pretty decent success. Second year I had an idea in my head of what a garden looked like so I made this big 50×10 foot garden. I rototilled up the dirt and made mounds of dirt in rows with stepping stones and managed to grow nothing but a bunch of weeds that year. Complete failure. The third year is when I built myself a fenced in 9×15 foot garden and started putting plants in containers. I had a really successful garden season that year and started getting into preserving my harvest. Last year I pretty much knocked it out of the park and by far had my most impressive gardening season yet. This year I feel I have a pretty good grasp on gardening going into the season. Which I’m really excited about.

I plan on doubling if not tripling my production this year as long as mother nature is on my side. She ultimately sets the rules. I will have 2 gardens going this year as well as all my container plants. One is at my home and the other is at a community garden in the park.

This is last year’s garden.

EJ Garden

Suburban gardening

 

My plans for the gardening sections of this blog are to cover everything from starting seeds to preserving your harvest for the year, whether it be canning or dehydrating, and everything that goes along with gardening in-between. A gardener told me a few weeks back to remember “KISS”. Keep It Simple Stupid. So I plan on keeping that in mind as good advice as I enter into this gardening season and document it here.

Happy Gardening!

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