Happy May!! Welcome to the 2024 Gardening season. I am looking forward to gardening — that’s one of the things I love most about summertime! This year, we opted to not garden at the community garden (it feels a little weird to not return to the community garden after three years), and instead turn our city backyard into a gardening dream!!
That is part of why I began Our City Homestead — to bring that old fashioned country living to the city, and that means doing as much for ourselves as we are able to, even though we live in the city!
Things like gardening, cooking and baking at home, learning old skills like sewing, crocheting and knitting, making soap and candles and so much more is all part of Our City Homestead — a step in the right direction of relying on stores for all of our needs and little less. This year, we are focusing on gardening and turning as much of our city yard into producing food for my family.
Last year, we landscaped the yard. We got the final grade done, got all the necessary permits, and did the final landscaping. We fixed the slope, pulled all the weeds, laid landscaping cloth and put a lot of sweat into it! We put cedar mulch and rock in the backyard, rock along the side and cedar mulch in the front yard. It took us a week to do it all! That was a lot of hauling back and forth! We decided to not put sod because, to be honest, I hate cutting grass!! I also thought cedar mulch around planters, trees and shrubs would be easier and much less maintenance than grass.
This is what it looked like last year in October when we completed the backyard. Fresh mulch looks beautiful! The dirt in the centre will be a garden bed.
The weather was quite warm last fall, and it was so nice to be able to finally enjoy the backyard before winter.
After winter, everything settled a bunch and a lot of the mulch “disappeared” into the dirt. And that’s totally ok and of course, to be expected. We ran low on mulch towards the end of landscaping last fall, so we may add a bit this year to the low sections. Next year we will add cedar mulch to the entire yard to replenish it so that the mulch is about 4” to 6” deep… and that will help with weeds. Since I did not want to purchase more landscaping cloth last fall, there is no cloth under the rocks. The rocky area is where a future deck may be, but we most likely may be changing that area of the yard! But that’s for another day! This is the backyard before we picked those pesky weeds from the rocks!
Since there’s only a few inches of dirt and then clay in the yard, we decided to put garden boxes all around, rather than trying to put the garden directly in the ground like a traditional garden.
May has been a chilly start to spring! After 2 days, and not the most cooperative weather (it’s been a mix of cloud, sun, wind and rain), the garden boxes are finally built! Since I do not have all the appropriate tools like saws, screw gun (it’s easier to build with screws than nails), levels and all the other tools needed, I got an old neighbor and his crew to do all that hard work for us! Sometimes it’s good to do the work yourself — it is our city homestead after all — and sometimes it’s good to hire a local business to do it for you! We got better pricing on all the wood, and it was built much quicker. It’s definitely a lot of garden beds but I can see all the potential and I’m most ecstatic!
The tall garden beds are 3’ wide, 32” deep and about 12’ long. Along the back fence the garden box is 30’ long.
There are 2 short garden beds – one is 12’ square (which is huge!) and the other is 4’ square and about 16” deep. The large garden bed is for pumpkin, cucumber, zucchini and other veggies that have vines and like to spread. In hindsight, I should have had six 4’ or 5’ square garden boxes instead. But it’s built and done and we will make the most of it!
Tic Tac Toe anyone!?! My daughter and I actually played giant Tic Tac Toe in the centre of this garden bed, and it was so much fun!
Now to fill these monster garden beds with dirt!
Let me show you how our trees and shrubs that we planted last fall faired.
We planted two apple trees last fall — a Goodland and a Fall Red Apple tree.
The rhubarb has come back to life which is great to see.
The honeyberry bushes we planted in the fall that we dug up from the community garden are not only leafed out but also blooming — so we’ll have honeyberries (also known as haskap) this year — the first time in almost three years! I was literally jumping up and down with excitement!!
The blueberry shrub we just purchased is full of flowers too. Looks like there will be lots of berries!
In our two existing garden beds from last year, we planted flowers in one box (it had flowers in this box last year also) as our “pollinator box” and the other had rhubarb from last season which did amazingly well plus we planted mint again (we planted mint with the rhubarb last year as well). We planted a few varieties of mint — mojito mint, Moroccan spearmint, chocolate mint, and pineapple mint.
The rhubarb grew so much in just a week!
When I saw the apple trees blossoming, I could not believe it, especially since we just planted these trees in the fall of 2023. I was so surprised! This is the Fall Red apple tree which was starting to blossom May 22. They look so pretty already!
And the Goodland apple tree is also blossoming.
Flowers were planted after long weekend. I love petunias, so we planted a few different colors.
It wasn’t long until the blossoms began to open on the apple trees.
I found the perfect tree for the backyard! It’s a Carmine Jewel cherry tree. I’m looking forward to when the tree is large enough to be able to preserve a bunch of cherries as pie filling, canned fruit and jam. But, in the meantime we’ll enjoy the cherries as they ripen.
We planted a few pepper plants also. First I decided where to place them before planting them in the dirt.
No garden is complete without herbs! We planted chives, basil, purple basil, and thyme. We have more room, so we will plant a few more kinds of herbs.
We have 5 flower pots as well to add color to the yard. They’re so pretty!
We will definitely have a lot of work ahead of us in June, filling all of the garden beds with dirt, planting the gardens and planting shrubs and trees. I am looking forward to getting it all ready. It’s lots of work to get it going, then it won’t be so bad to maintain it!
Did you plant your garden? What did you plant?
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours