Our Garden Before & After

Hi friends!

Ready for a garden tour and before & after photos? This was such a fun post to compile - so satisfying to see how far we've come!

When we moved to this 10 acre property two years ago, we were excited to finally have enough sunshine and space to create our dream garden. The photo above is right after we moved in. We gave away the playground set and the trampoline, moved the sand and kept the lumber to re-purpose in the flower beds. More recently we removed all of the arborvitae in the back that were functioning as a deck railing but blocked the view from the deck.

With two big dogs who love to dig, we needed a fence to enclose the garden. We wanted something rustic and low profile since we already have a lot of fencing going on in the back yard and - just as important - we wanted something we could put up ourselves. We chose a cedar split rail fence. It's sturdy, easy to construct, with a little help from YouTube, and it's worked out great. Actually, with some effort, the dogs can squeeze through the rails of the fence, but they've only done it when I've left out some bone meal. Otherwise, they don't bother!

We planted the edges of the garden with perennials and continued to build the cedar raised beds. This is what we planted along the edges:

• Purple Coneflower
• Bee balm
• Salvia
• Russian Sage
• Catmint
• Phlox
• Goldenrod
• Black Eyed Susans
• Sunflowers

Then we had to decide how to best cover the walkways. We considered using bark mulch, gravel, and various types of ground cover. There are pros and cons for each, which I won't go into here, but we decided to go with the easiest option: bark mulch, since the previous owners left us a giant pile of it, which we are still using two years later! We also repurposed some landscaping rocks from the front of the property to make the rock beds in the center of the garden.

You can see from the photos that we experimented with several configurations of rock beds and cedar beds. The photo above shows the final lay-out. We got as much done as we could before winter rolled around - finishing the bark mulch and filling most of the beds with a 5 way soil blend. We couldn't wait until spring!

This is the plan Bert used to build the arbor.

It seemed like winter lasted FOREVER! 

We started a few things from seed indoors in the early spring but planted everything else outside once the threat of frost had passed. We initially thought we'd plant more veggies but ended up planting about 80% flowers, 20% veggies and I think that's the perfect ratio for us.