Fall Backyard

I dedicated this weekend to knocking off some project work and while it impeded my sleeping in and my back, I luckily succeeded.  My two main goals were to stain our new pergola and get my garden going for the fall. Done and done!
 
I’ve long had a dream of us owning enough land to have a huge garden full of any produce we wanted plus extra to sell at a cute farmer’s market in a cute little town nearby.  But, we live on an island full of sand, with houses all around us, and a little yard, so that dream’s gonna have to wait a while longer but until then, to get me by, I built us a 12×4 raised bed a few years ago.
 
 
Brand new garden back in January 2010

The fall season veggies do best for us since the summers get so freakin’ hot and our winters are so mild.  I used to try to start things from seed but always had issues with things munching on them in the garden and don’t have a bright enough place in the house to do them there, so transplants it is!  This season I got broccoli, kale, cauliflower (purple and yellow!), cilantro, parsley, dill, chives, basil, onions, carrots (still from seed) and some lettuce (which it may be still too hot for but we’ll see).

Being as OCD as I am, I am a huge fan of square foot gardening 1) to maximize the little space I have, and 2) to keep everyone neat and orderly.  There used to be fishing line marking my squares but the eye hooks rusted away so now I just eyeball it.

There is a shadier side to the garden so all of the herbs went down there and the other end has the onion sets and carrot seed.  Carrots are my absolute favorite all-time thing to grow (followed by red potatoes) because they taste so amazing when they’re homegrown!  Kind of like how tomatoes do :)  When they’re ready I’ll usually dig one up, wash it off at the hose, and munch on it while I’m weeding or doing other stuff in the backyard.

I also got a new soaker hose cause, you know, I’m too lazy to stand and water a 4×12 garden.  No, not really, it’s that I don’t have enough blood for all the mosquitoes we have right now :/  Anyway, I get these flat 50′ soakers and they fit perfect in here.

So the garden is all ready but there was one more incomplete task on my backyard list: staining our new pergola.  We built this guy back in May but once it was ready to be stained it was sooooo hot outside!  So it’s been unfinished all summer and the poor top boards were already starting to weather a little.
 
(to see how we built this guy, click here)
 

Back in February, I stained our new side gate with SW’s Deckscapes Waterborne Semi-Transparent stain and loved it.  It still looks this good and water beads right off of it.  So I knew that’s what I wanted to use on the pergola too.

I used their “Cedar Bark” color on the gate but wanted the pergola to be a bit darker and less red so I used “Hawthorne” and think it came out perfect!  Well, the color did, my cleanliness, notsomuch.  Don’t look too close, there are some drips I need to try and get rid of :/  But hey, it’s hard to stain well on top of a ladder (and around a pond).  Of course I highly recommend staining before you build, I we were just too impatient as usual.

So our backyard is all ready to go for the “winter”!  It looks even more polished off now that the pergola is stained.  Now if the mosquitoes would just take a hike that’d be great.  On to the multitude of interior/craft projects I have!

6 thoughts on “Fall Backyard

  1. You have a lovely garden :-) I started to grow my own veg before we moved across here and I adored homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers. I could never get pumpkins to mature though :-/

    1. I’ve never tried pumpkins but I do have a hard time with squashes for some reason :/ Watermelons do great in the summer heat though!

  2. Your garden looks amazing! We have a small garden so just keep a few pots with herbs in them – it’s so nice to add the fresh herbs when cooking.

    1. It makes such a difference using fresh herbs, some years I want to do the whole thing in herbs for cooking :)

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