Spring time work

When Jay and I first got married we made a set of goals for our marriage.  One was that when we got a house we'd do a garden.  Well since we bought our house last year and then he deployed all we got a chance to do was plant some fruit trees and berry bushes.  This year is a whole new ball game in that regards.  Since the weather has been turning more warm we decided to map out and plan our first garden.  Our back yard floods each time it rains so we knew in advance that we'd have to do some form of garden boxes.  We planned out what we want to plant and then managed to hit up a great deal on garden boxes that would work perfectly in the space we have for doing a garden.

We bought four of them the first time around and are already talking about getting another one.

Each box takes 16 bags of soil so we only did one box this first time around.  The rest will be put together in the coming weeks as we need them for the different crops we're doing. 

Jay was able to put the whole thing together in about 30 min from start to finish.  Then began the planting.  We'd ordered some strawberry plants and raspberry bushes from a company that my in laws have used for years to purchase fruit trees.  My in laws had even given us 2 fruit trees from this company as a home coming gift which were planted just a few short weeks before Jay got home from his deployment last December.

We planted in this first box our raspberry bushes, 2 from last year and the 3 new ones, and our strawberry plants.  The rest of the garden boxes will have: tomatoes, a variety of peppers for making salsa, peas, lettuce, corn, pumpkins, and watermelon.  We also have two blackberry bushes from last year as well.  Were talking about planting some squash and zucchini as well, though that is still up in the air.

This is one of our two peach trees.  We planted this one just before Jay deployed and it was my job to keep it alive.  Apparently I did quite well at the task because it looks like we'll be seeing a good season of peaches from it!!  We have a Persimone tree (type of fruit), four apple trees (two we have no clue on, one Rome Beauty and one Honey Crisp), a pear tree, and our two peach trees.  We might get apples out of the Honey Crisp tree this year too, but it's still too early to tell.  The Rome and one peach tree that were planted late last year wont be giving us anything for a few years yet.

A few weeks after planting our strawberries they now look like this!  I am so excited to see our garden is already off to a good start.  The raspberry bushes are starting to have buds form so we'll be seeing fruit from them this year too.

After a lot of discussion we decided we needed more strawberries in this house, anyone who has seen Annabelle knows that child can eat strawberries like they are candy.  She has been caught eating 2lbs of them in one sitting more than once because she just LOVES them.  This cute little strawberry planter has 20 plants in it on top of the 25 we already planted in our garden box.

When we ordered the strawberry plants and raspberry bushes we also ordered some rose bushes for the front yard.  Jay knows how much I love roses and so now I'll have my own rose garden, though small, just like my Grandpa does.

My rose bushes are: 2 double knockouts, a White Out, and a Rainbow knockout.  I have one other rose bush that we planted last year and gives such beautiful roses already.

This area in the front yard has been my personal dislike for a while.  I don't like the bushes and so with my new roses came a great excuse to get rid of these suckers!

We mapped out where I wanted each of my roses to go...

And then Jay went to work getting rid of those bushes!  Thankfully it had rained really well the night before so the ground was soft and easy to work with.

In about an hour we had all 4 planted along side my other rose bush (just on the far right of the photo).

My Rainbow knockout was already showing one flower before we planted it.  Now I have 4 different roses that have started to bloom!!  I can't wait until the rest of my roses are blooming and the color stands out.

This is just the beginning of our yard work for this year.  We have been thinning out the trees in our yard, weeding like crazy, purchasing more bulbs to plant more flowers to give the front some serious color, and overall working on getting the yard looking the way we want it to.  We'll be doing more gardening in the next few weeks as the next round of plants need to be planted for their season.  And come this fall will be lots and lots of canning, our entire reason for doing a garden in the first place.