It’s been a busy spring around here, and while I’ve spent the last few posts here giving away stuff and admiring my mad garden design skills (ha ha) I haven’t even shown you all the best part. You may now bask in the glory of my new vegetable garden:

Okay, so it’s not exactly lush and fruitful just yet, but it’s on its way! At the front are eight of the tomatoes I started inside this winter. I’m happy with the way they’re growing. The red plastic is one of our experiments this year—we wanted to see if it would really make a difference or not. So far, these are a bit bigger than tomatoes planted on the same day without the red plastic. We’ll see if the trend continues throughout the season. Behind the tomatoes, we have onions, leeks, carrots, radishes, turnips, broccoli, brussels sprouts, lettuces, watermelons, acorn squashes, and corn. At the very back, along the fence, we’ve planted potatoes. So far, everything has sprouted, and now we’re thinning seedlings. (Well, we’re thinning the stuff I planted. I’m a bit more, um, haphazard, than my husband is with the seeding….)

Here’s a view looking out in the other direction:

My favorite thing about this garden, besides all of the food we’re going to get out of it, is that this was totally wasted space before. I’ve written about this area. It started out as a butterfly garden, but it sucked because we don’t really sit and look at this area all that much. Then it was going to be a cutting garden, but I gave up on that pretty early because I was thinking it would be a good spot to grow veggies. Then last year, we had a mix of some of the perennials and some veggies, including tomatoes and some beans and cucumbers climbing the fence. Some of you might remember that my neighbors made me cry when they ripped out my plants in an insane yard cleaning frenzy (why they felt the need to clean my yard, I still don’t quite understand…)

But now we have this new veggie garden, and it more than doubles the amount of vegetable garden space we had previously. Each of the long beds is four feet wide by 15 feet long. Notice that there is nothing growing within a foot of the fence between me and my neighbor