Beautification

Time for a garden update. After we pulled out the corn and the garden looked bare and awful for a while. Not for long though, because a plethora of pumpkin vines came up from the compost and because the weather wasn't quite right to plant anything else, we let them grow. 

And grow they did. You can read about pumpkin spoils here and here. But then the weather got to be just right for planting other things, and so the pumpkins were not longer appreciated. I thought they would die back naturally, after they had grown their pumpkins, but alas, they just kept growing (you can see their abundant growth in a picture in this post from March). In the end, we had to do a big cull of pumpkin vines so that we could top up the dirt, re-mulch and plant the tomato seedlings. 

Now the garden looks like this:

Some of those seedlings came from a friendly neighbourhood donation actually. Someone else in in the suburb had a heap pop up and decided they could share the tomato love. What a great neighbourhood we live in!

The garden looks so professional, we we even put in some stakes and wire for the tomato plants to be supported by. There is one pumpkin vine (top left), which grows out of the box and onto the grass. There are two pumpkins still on this vine growing steadily. I've also put some snow pea seeds in too, so hopefully we will see them sprout up soon.

Meanwhile, out front, our rusty old wire fence is getting some winter beautification. Last winter, I planted snow peas around the swing set, using the poles for a natural trellis. You can read about it here. I noticed then that the ones that did the best were the ones in the sun the most. Thinking about it, the front of our house gets a lot of sun most days, so using the front fence for a trellis seemed to be the next logical thing.

The kids and I planted these. I went along with a shovel and made a little hole and got the kids to follow me with seeds and the instruction that they were to put one seed in each hole. Then we went along with a bag of potting mix and they put a handful of potting mix on the top of each.

They look small and cute now, but hopefully they grow up and make the rusty front fence look a bit nicer, even for just a little while. There are a mix of snow peas and other bean seeds, just for variety. Should be good. The gaps are where there was some random cement in the ground (I can only assume from a previous fence?) or the kids missed a hole.

This clump of seedlings are from the first hole, where the children clearly got over excited about putting seeds in.