Mavis Mail – Amanda From Idaho Sends in Her Garden Pictures

A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other people’s pictures and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all have a rock star garden this summer. Keep them coming!

Hi Mavis!

We’ve been doing a ton of work in our yard and garden this year and we’re really pleased with how its all doing, so I thought I’d send you some pictures. 🙂

My husband Ben and I live in Idaho We moved to this house in July 2011. We both grew up with parents who have grown big epic gardens for years and years, so we both knew we wanted space for a good garden. On top of that, Ben has a degree in landscape architecture and didn’t want a boring yard.

The house is a very ordinary, cookie cutter 1000 sq feet, but it was clean, sound and freshly painted and the lot is .33 acre. When we walked out the back door we were sold! The house had been bank owned and the lawn was half dead and loaded with weeds so our first summer was primarily spent digging out weeds and just keeping it watered consistently. It greened up pretty well and we were quickly convinced that we needed much less lawn to mow. 😀

Since then we’ve built garden beds, covered the paths between them with weed fabric, added a shed and parking area for my husbands work truck/trailer, gotten chickens, added various flower and herb beds, five baby fruit trees and two grapes, and finally this spring we finished adding gravel and cobble to cover and edge all of our pathways. Oh, and we’ve had three kids since moving in. 😉

We could tell when we started working with things here that someone in the house’s history had cared a bit about the landscape. There was a gazebo and quite a few pavers hiding in the grass and the one back flower bed. Re-purposing the pavers helped us quite a bit as we tried to be frugal with our first modifications to the environment.

After tearing out the sprinkler rotted gazebo deck it has become, as a pergola, one of our favorite places in the yard. Breakfast is so much nicer eaten outside! It served another purpose after we put wire fencing up two sides of it to grow pole beans. Putting the beans here was an experiment, but they have produced really well here for four years now and give an extra bit of shade to the kids play tables later in the summer.

This years first adventurous vine has just reached the top and there are buds everywhere! This year I’m growing a mix of Blue Lake Pole beans and a new to me variety called Rattlesnake. We added a simple fire pit to the space this spring, so that has been fun too.

Last year we added a long herb bed along the back of the house and it has been another favorite place of mine. This area initially had some of the thickest, tallest growing grass in the yard and I was sure that we would have to dig out the sod, but Ben wanted to try something else. He mowed it short, then we put down a layer of cardboard, topped it with a thick layer of grass clippings, and spent a couple days watering it really heavily. Then we topped it with a couple inches of compost.

I was initially skeptical about the method, but the results were amazing. I grew basil from seed and they absolutely stole the show in this space. They got, no exaggeration, three feet tall. Once I finally let them bloom I had the hum of hundreds of happy bees right out my back door. This year the basil is seeming more normal sized, but my lavender, bee balm and chamomile have gotten established and are all blooming beautifully.

This years garden is looking great! After a rough start in the house the tomatoes are enormously bushy and loaded with blossoms and the first brave one is almost ripe. I’m most excited for the cherry tomatoes and I hope I managed to plant a good rainbow of them. The strawberries had an epic second year.

We started last year with 25 bare root plants and this year we got about six pounds of berries. I started squash inside this year, which I’ve never done before and have already harvested 4. The pumpkins and winter squash are super long and viney, taking over my corn bed already. Definitely miles ahead of other years. Garlic is just about harvest ready. A new seed start for this year was celery. I started them inside and finally moved these tiny plants outside in the shade of the garlic (not expecting too much) and they’ve really been taking off now that they’re in the ground.

The garden was planned around a small maple tree in the back yard. We decided we wanted something a bit different than normal, so we placed the beds in a half circle wagon wheel type shape. It is definitely interesting, but we have both agreed that for our eventual next house(if I can ever bear to move) straight lines and rows would be much more practical for figuring out watering. Unfortunately a gopher killed the tree last summer. The garden seemed a bit uncentered after that, so we re-purposed some block and made the space a sandbox for the kids.

Our original garden beds are made from 6ftx5.5in cedar fencing boards. We chose this method because the sizing is very convenient, it involved minimal cutting 🙂 and the price seemed reasonable for our frugal selves. We have twelve 3×6 foot beds, and paid something like $130 for fencing, screws, and some other wood. They have worked quite well, but after five years a couple of them are starting to show some real wear.

Ben plans to start replacing them just a couple at a time starting next year, probably with concrete work. We’ve added several more beds to accommodate bigger space hogs, like the raspberries, corn and squash, but they are mostly semi-raised, just edged in some big cobble.

We got 6 chickens a year and a half ago and added 7 chicks this spring. They all have names. We get 3-6 eggs a day from our three year old hens and are eagerly waiting for the chicks to start laying eventually. The new chicks got very socialized by our kids and will all come mill around when I go in to check eggs or take pictures. This is Jump learning about my expectations for her.

Between the garden and 13 laying hens I think we will be eating a lot of food grown by us this year. We are really looking forward to a couple years from now when the fruit trees get producing. We’ve already decided that planting trees is something we’ll have to do first at the next house, instead of five and six years in like we’ve done here. 🙂

We’ve had some pretty good garden years and some pretty meh garden years and one year we took completely off, but this is the first year that I looked at the property as a whole and thought, hey, I think we might have finally tamed it. Of course, there’s always work to do! Weeds to pull, hoses to move, grass to improve and ​​​​​​​​​​​​mow and use for mulch, general beautifying to do and always always always ideas for more and better gardening.

Thanks for letting me ramble!
Amanda

PS, I’m on instagram as mama_has_hobbies if anyone would like to see further adventures of our chickens and garden and my baking, etc. This time of year it’s a whole lot of garden pictures!

~Mavis

If you would like to have your garden, chicken coop, pantry or something you’ve made featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, here’s what I’m looking for:

• Your Garden Pictures and Tips – I’d especially like to see your garden set ups, growing areas, and know if you are starting seeds indoors this year. If so, show me some picture of how you are going about it.
• Your Pantry Pics – Pictures of your pantry/fridge/cabinets, as well as a short blurb {at the very least} about you and your food habits.
• Your Chicken and Chicken Related Stories – Coops, Chicks, Hen’s, Roosters, Eggs, you name it. If it clucks, send us some pictures to share with the world.
• Cool Arts & Crafts – Made from your very own hands with detailed {and well photographed} pictures and instructions.
• Your pictures and stories about your pets. The more pictures and details the better.
• Garage Sale, Thrift Store and Dumpster Diving pictures and the stories behind the treasures you found including how much you paid for them.

You’ll need to send in a Minimum of 5 HIGH QUALITY pictures and the stories to go along with those pictures. Do not send in a couple of grainy photos and a sentence about them. I can’t post that. It doesn’t make for an interesting or informative story.

If I feature your pictures and the stories behind them on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I will send you a $20.00 gift card to the greatest store in the world: Amazon.com. You can send your submissions to me at onehundreddollarsamonth @ gmail.com {spaces removed} and be sure and put Mavis Mail in the subject line. Thank you. I’m looking forward to your submissions.

Go  HERE for the official rules.