Garden Overview

Bits and pieces. Bits and pieces. I’ve toyed with you for months now talking about various parts of the garden, always giving you bits and pieces. Its time to see the garden as a whole, or at least as much of it as Kevin can get in his fisheye lens in this shot. He certainly made a worthy attempt, climbing on the roof with his camera equipment late last summer.

We started out 10 years ago with nothing but grass-filled weeds and the pines you see in the middle of the yard. Fast forward and you have major garden instead. Yes, the pines are in the middle even though it doesn’t look like it. That’s the magic of a fish-eye lens. More content, but the proportions are gone.

We have a half acre, which is roughly 100′ x 200′. We did have to give up some of the garden because it had a house on the property, but the house is small. To give you some idea of how much garden that can be, let’s talk about the fence project Mike took on a few years ago. As he redid the fence, he moved it back 10 feet. That gained a new yard area that was 10 feet deep by 100 feet across. That is 1000 square feet – a new area larger than many entire yards.

We tell ourselves we aren’t trying to get rid of the grass. We say we are not going to build any new garden areas. We say those things all the time. It’s not true. I’d have to say we are really heading towards more garden, less maintenance. For example, the berm area you can barely see to the right is mostly shrubs and groundcover. Further out of sight are 3 river birch that replaced annual beds. Minimal maintenance.

Here is another picture without the fish-eye lens. It shows less garden, but is more to scale. You certainly aren’t seeing it all, especially since we have a corner lot so we not only garden here and in the front, we garden on the side as well.

More pictures will be coming soon as I take photos of each area. I’d better get out there and do some more spring cleanup before my camera and I give you the grand tour.