Something a little different in its beginning stages, garden and art.

There's so much more I want to do,
but here's what's been done.

Amateur gardener trying a Back to Eden style garden.  About thirty fruit and nut trees most planted this last fall, and about 500??? vegetables from peas to watermelon.  Mostly overseeded brassicas, lettuce, peas, and beans.
So far so good.  1/3 of acre of which very little is garden at this point.  I have three fenced areas.  The pool, the house/yard, and the side yard/secondary garden area.  The pool level is about two feet higher than all of the areas.
I'm espaliering most of the new trees.

First one is of the view from the patio.  There's a three year old white Banks rose covering it.  It's just now starting to bloom.
In the distance down the path is the sunflower gate.

The opposite view of the patio area.

The sunflower gate.  It turned out better than expected, but it is not the most rigid of gates due to the way it's made.  It's just for fun.

This one is too cool, although my least favoUrite as far as how it turned out.

Cool, only because the gate is supposed to be a raven sitting in a bottle of time............
and the second I snapped this picture,
A raven just happened to have wings full spread,
directly overhead.
Bwahahaha

(I'm a fan of Poe......)

and I only snapped that one picture this morning.


Had to edit this....seconds after posting......

You could say both birds were right on time..........

First section of garden in secondary garden area.  Opposite side of raven gate.

Mostly kale, and some misc. other stuff.  About 2' X 10' or so.

Very pretty yard.

Here's the other side of the secondary garden area.  
2' X 20' or so?  Mostly kale, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, some tomatoes, and peppers and a few squash or pumpkin?   I was mainly drunk when I planted everything........


The sharper people will notice the recurrence of orange........

Thank you, Tyler,

I'm fishing for some attention today....



more to come....

This is the most difficult thing I've made.  It is heavy duty, and took a lot of time to make.  The spider hole is the bottom half of a fire extinguisher (more on the other half later).  The spiders and snakes are scrap metal.  Each cob of web was bent in a vice with a hammer and welded into place........it took a while.

My whimsical paint job kind of softened it up a bit.

Oh, and the best part is that if you notice the snake poking out from the grape vines,
it's the actual steel latch that keeps the gate closed.

This is the gate that leads into the main garden/pool/chicken pit.

a closer view of the creepy gate.  Grapes growing over the top.

This'll be the third year for the grapes...........
and at the end of the year I probably will say I haven't ate one grape of these damned vines so far!!!

I never said I was good at this.

Very cool

Thank you Maureen, if I remember right, you asked about shipping some asparagus seed.
I'm still happy to do so, but sadly I got none to germinate myself, so I'm not quite sure it would be worth it.  It'd be better to get it from a more reputable source considering the distance.......

Let's see here,

where was I?

Oh yeah,

here's a snake coming out of custom made fence panel.

Why not?

Bwahahahaha!

So here is the main garden area.  Again, mainly kales, some beets, carrots, peas against the fence, lot's of radish, some tomatoes, and peppers.

Wood chips will soon cover the compost/mulch as soon as the plants get a little larger.

Going to try and bury containers in wood chips to see if it helps insulate, and retain moisture.  I'm certain it will look better with the old pots buried.  Mostly herbs, and a bunch of miscellaneous in the pots.

The in ground pool (covered by the tarps to the right) has been converted to a chicken/duck coop, rainwater storage, egg making, compost tea brewing, soil making, (hopefully not salmonella/listeria producing) pit of despair.  I'm questioning how much longer I can keep the ducks........

Here's the other half of the pool garden area.  More planters around the perimeter leading into the coop, and three beds.  One mainly potatoes, one mainly onions and garlic, and one of a mix of lettuce/cabbage/broccoli.

Espaliering is a form of art?

Well, other than having strapped down the main leader, I haven't done much to get the branches horizontal, except for a few trees.
It's a work in progress.

This is about a 100' long strip 9' wide with sixteen fruit and nut trees.  I'm using 1" square mild tubing for posts, and square concrete mesh for the trellis.  Flimsy, but totally acceptable for what I want to use it for.

So cool to just walk along the driveway and pick fruits right through the wire mesh.

I'll eventually put some 1/2" hardware cloth along the bottom two feet of trellis, and enclose the area so the chickens can have a nice long run.

That's most of it.  

Here's the front door to the house.
A story behind it which I'll share.

When I bought this house, it had a colony of bats roosting above my front door.

I hung cd's to frighten them,
shot them with a pellet gun  
and I think sprayed some kind of pepper up around the stucco where they were roosting.

All of that being said, I really have no problem with bats, and have actually always appreciated their appetite for insects.

It was gross opening the door to what looked like rat poop, and urine stains around the top perimeter of the stucco.

I gave up, built a bat house, and hung a bell made out of a fire extinguisher I cut in half.......see the spider hole from above.........

It worked out perfect.

The bats don't use the house, and still piss and stain my stucco,
there's poop on the floor in the summer,

and obviously nature made me realize,
it wanted me to have bats in my belfry.

The moral being nature knows best,
which is what I believe permaculture to be.



Thanks for looking,

I'm taking a nap.