Urban Garden

If you have been following along on my Instagram stories, you may have seen that we have finally finished our urban garden area! It took about 4-5 months to start and finish (we started when I was about 8 months pregnant with Reagan). Well, we are finally done!

This is what it looked like before we started, don't be fooled, that isn't actually good grass, it is weeds and crab grass and it was not pleasant to walk on or look at. Plus who needs that much lawn anyways? We have an entire other section of backyard for grass to be put in eventually so the girls can play. (to the left of the first photo will be all grass on that side where their playhouse it.)

We knew that we didn't NEED or want this much grass area in our yard plus we wanted an area to really grow our own food and to teach our girls about planting seeds and having them be able to watch those seeds grow into something beautiful and edible. I drew up on paper about 5-6 different ideas and ultimately landed on our final design which allowed us to section off this side of the yard and to get the most out of the space.

I originally wasn't even going to have this as an edible garden and just put plants or a large fire-pit here but we don't really use our fire-pit now as it is so why design something we won't use? We ultimately came up with this idea because my oldest daughter and I really enjoy going to our local nursery and she LOVES to smell all of the pretty bright flowers and has an excitement (?) attack every time she sees birds and butterflies. So why not make her little face up like that at home? I drew up a design with raised wood planter beds and two stock tanks and have filled them with beautiful flowers and edible plants. I knew that with the right flowers and plants that we could draw in all sorts of fragrances and creatures to our yard for her to look at.

Even though I had drawn this out on paper already, it was a great visual representation to actually go out and draw, or spray paint what we wanted. This helped us decide on the size of boxes we wanted and where exactly we were going to put them.

We were lucky enough to reclaim all of this wood from my brothers yard so this project really didn't end up costing us much except A LOT of hard work and time, but it all paid off in the end.

We still want to eventually outline the edges with brick to help keep all the rocks in this area stay put and add more larger stepping stones to break up all of this pebble but that will slowly happen over time. As of now (Fall 2018) we have different types of broccoli, kale, lettuce, garlic, spinach and many different herbs growing in the urban garden. In the outermost (bigger) stock tank, we have all of our herbs from thyme, dill, oregano and more! In the smaller stock tank in the middle we have a couple of very colorful flowers to draw in the butterflies, hummingbirds and bees. We also have honeysuckle growing up the trellis, I cant wait until it's completely covered and the smell, ahhhhhh the smell. The wood planters have all of the edible plants for now but I would like to add more flowers mixed in there.

The end goal of having an edible garden and beautiful plants/flowers in our yard is absolutely amazing but the BEST part is seeing our daughters face light up every time she sees a bird out there enjoying the trellis and flowers. We are excited to watch everything grow and can't wait until next Spring to watch all of the flowers bloom and plants really take off.

XXO,

Cass

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