How I Made a Garden from Recycled Items

For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with a garden.  From my early childhood of my mom teaching me to buildup a strawberry hill to a giant garden with a flower cutting garden on one side and a vegetable garden on the other.  Now that we’ve been in our “new” foreclosure, I was so excited to put a garden in our backyard.

Luckily, most of the garden structure design items were already in our yard…  The bricks that were used for the boarder had been hidden under the giant palm bushes in the front yard flower bed.  The old metal gate that the cucumbers are climbing up, was stuck in the corner of the backyard.  I also reused the decorative features from my garden before last.

As for dirt and some of the vegetable plants, we visited a local garden supply store Akin’s.  It was such an amazing place with very helpful staff. They claim the largest crape myrtle in North America.  I’m guessing it was amazing during the height of the blooming season.

After figuring out where to put the garden with the help of Miss Pickles of course…

I put out the bricks in place…

Then put the gate against the fence for the cucumber vines and Next it was time to put in about 6 bags of dirt…

Looking more like a garden!

Next up…  time for planting!  Yipppeeee!  I went a bit crazy with all the plants I bought for the space but with a small urban garden you have to think vertical and no spaces between the plants.  My tiny plot of land has 6 cucumber plants, 6 tomatoes, 6 orange bell peppers, 6 red bell peppers, 6 yellow squash, 6 zucchini, 1 little lemon basil(that will overtake any garden if you’re not careful), and three recently halves of potatoes burried cut side down with two that have since sprouted.

After planting everything, I put mulch to try to help keep the weeds at bay and TAH DAH!  An easy peasy garden with supplies already in our own backyard!

About 5-6 weeks later and we are starting to harvest produce…  a bunch of yellow squash, a zucchini, and a weird long cucumber hanging from the gate.

On a side note, the tomatoes are actually from the planter in our front yard that we just now were able to harvest.  They’ve been planted for well over 8 weeks.  But that’s not the side note…  Ok, check these tomatoes out in the picture below  See how they are all split near the stem?  The tomatoes are still deliciously fine to eat.  The splits in the tomatoes happened because of a sudden amount of water (generally from a rainstorm but could be from a waterhose being left on).

Speaking of rainstorms…  it’s amazing how much the garden seems to grow overnight after a big rain!  Here’s what the garden is looking like now…

Do you have a garden?  Let’s chat about it in the comments below!