Edible Landscaping

Have you ever looked at your lawn and though “Yeah- tear that sucker out and fill the yard with squash!”

You have?!  Me too!

It’s something I’ve always been interested, but we’re finally making our dream a reality.  The previous owners of our house brought in truck loads of dirt and covered most of the front yard- they covered the flower beds, the natural rock retaining wall, everything.  Now, two years later, the grass is mostly moss, the lawn is lumpy, and the water drains toward the house.  They also built a retaining wall with store-bought  “wall bricks” (what ARE those things called??) along the edge of the driveway.  Unfortunately, the retaining wall was on top of old wooden edgers, which were quickly decomposing and the whole wall was leaning.

My excellent husband has spent the last few weeks with a shovel and a wheelbarrow- the retaining wall is dismantled and stacked in the backyard, and the sod has slowly been cut out square by square and carted to a compost pile at the edge of the greenbelt in the backyard.  We’ll mix it with the massive piles of leaves left over from Fall, and hopefully have plenty of compost for next year’s garden.  My daughters and I are in charge of picking all the field stones out of the dirt left behind, and then he carts that to a pile in the backyard too.  We’ll use the larger rocks to make pathways or  small walls around the vegetable plots to make raised beds.  Good thing we have lots of dirt!

Our big hope is to have enough finished by our first frost-free day to plant a large garden in the front yard- the date is officially in April.  We’ll have flowers up by the street and vegetables closer to the house.  So far he’s making amazing progress, I am so excited!