Chapter Two

I intended to write this chapter about three months ago. Time flies and no one catches up with it! It is a cloudy, fall day and I have some beautiful fall pictures of the garden to post, but first let's finish the story about the backyard transformation. We left off with the mystery of what was going on to the left of the new fountain.

This is the before shot of the area in front of the garden house. The really lovely garden house was just not being shown off to its best potential and the raised beds which used to grow vegetables were now too much in the shade for good vegetable growing and had been relegated to nursery beds for perennials waiting to go into the garden, weeds and lots of self-seeding garlic. Time for a change!



Digging out the dirt so that the raised beds could be removed.


The original plan was to remove the raised beds carefully so that they could be transported to our daughter's house and placed in her vegetable garden. But, in the process of digging and lifting three, heavy frames Dave stacked one on top of another to get it out of the way. Wait a minute! That looks like the perfect compost bin! So, Plan B: keep the frames and stack them all up on each other for two, side-by-side, 4x4' compost bins. Ingenious!

Voila!!








The other addition to the space was a potting bench. I wanted one I could stand up at without breaking my back and I wanted to be able to face out into the garden while standing there. So, I designed, and Dave built, a potting bench with shelves for nursing new plants and also with its southern exposure, a place to grow herbs.









There you have it. The backyard transformation summer 2008.

I have lots of really pretty garden pictures taken recently. I promise to start posting those tomorrow.