Gardening 2014: Starting out passionate

Lately I have been loving working in the garden!! Ever year is usually a complete failure (other than last year when I didn't even plant it in the first place. I had my friend Natalie plant it and reap from it for the summer/fall).

But three things changed for this year: I'm only planting plants I have plans for and none of my plants have to be bottled (yay! Bottling is still an overwhelming and new concept for me that I plan on conquering one day, just not this year! :)), Natalie showed me that keeping up on weeding and then actually reaping in the harvest is POSSIBLE in MY GARDEN (another new concept for me), and I've had a year to realize that having at least one successful year of gardening is a huge goal of mine that was subconscious until now.

So here's my first tapered furrow that I was sooo proud of!!

Here's my two rows of carrots and two rows of spinach. We eat carrots as a staple vegetable and I eat spinach in green smoothies almost every day. Green smoothies can be expensive but not if spinach (and strawberries-below a few pictures) are growing in my garden!!

Then I planted two rows of kale for some more green smoothie fun:

Other part of the garden that has me stoked is the strawberries! Kind of as a last minute decision, I decided that my garden is a green smoothie garden and therefore strawberries are essential! Sidenote: trav backs me up on all this and appreciates my effort but we've decided that its fine if it's "my" garden. :)

Anyway, 3 years ago trav and I added what we call black "weed guard" stuff to our flower gardens in the back. Although the black weed guard is WAY tacky when you can see it through the wood chips (sorry, Michelle, you've had to look at it all these years!) we dubbed this a fantastic decision because we haven't had to weed it for YEARS!

But this year I cut out a section and I'm going to plant strawberries in a few weeks and hope over the years the strawberry plants will spread and become a nice ground cover too.

Under the bay window will be flower bushes and in front of the window well be the strawberries.

So fun to have a hobby that's also productive on many levels!! :)