The Frugal Garden: Dooryard Garden Update

 A Dooryard garden is an easily accessible garden space, just outside a doorway, for easy harvesting of herbs, flowers and sometimes vegetables.  Mine is by my front door, so I work to keep it visually pleasing.

I keep a seed starting area inside my house and every week I replace dying plants with new seedlings.  If I do have a blank area, I keep a variety of attractive pots planted and move them into the empty space.

Here are my dooryard garden at the beginning of the growing season and now when most of the plants are maturing.

Experiment with the plants that you use for cooking and with your favorite flowers.  Two of the larger pots contain hot peppers, one yellow and one red.  Both are attractive and tasty.

God bless,

Pam

Rehabbing The Dooryard Garden

Now that our construction is mostly done it is time to rehab my poor, beaten up dooryard garden.  It's going to be interesting because the basic shape of the garden is changed.  Instead of being a gentle curve, with the new walkway it now has some sharp angles.

As you can see the first thing is to replace the edging stones.  Then it needs a thorough weeding, a complete redo of the micro irrigation system, mulch, and then the fun part, planting.

I need to plan carefully when choosing plants.  I want some low, draping plants to cover the sharp turns the walk makes.  I am also looking for a solar lantern to add some low light to the walk at night.

You will be accompanying me on this project.  Stay tuned for more.

God bless,
Pam

Dooryard Garden: Fall Cleanup and Planting

The front dooryard garden took a beating this summer since I couldn't get out to keep it cleaned up or plant my usual summer flowers and herbs.  We had a pretty rainy summer and what I call witch grass took over.  DH took over the clean up a week ago and started with the planting for which I am very grateful.

Witch Grass

Our dooryard garden is right outside the front door and is usually planted with Florida native perennials, seasonal annuals, herbs and sometimes vegetables.  It also has our two lemongrass plants.  It is the garden that anyone passing our house sees.  It is very visible.

DH planted (from seed) basil, cilantro, and oregano.  He trimmed back the lemongrass and perennials and began planting some fall mums.  It's looking a little sparse right now, but will fill in soon.  We need to go to one of our County parks to get some free mulch.

One of the major tasks that I am in charge of is maintaining the micro irrigation system.  DH  told me that some of the sprinkler heads weren't working, so we spent part of a morning testing the system.  Most of the nonworking heads were clogged with a bit of dirt and were easily cleaned out with an unbent paper clip.  A couple of them are just worn out and need to be replaced.

We have two kinds of sprinkler heads in this micro irrigation system.  The older kind are fairly complicated with filters and shut off valves.  These tend to need alot of attention to keep them working. The newer kind, and the one I hope to completely transition to, are made by Rainbird.  They have no moving parts, are very basic and take almost no maintenance to keep them going.

Older Sprinklers

Newer, Simple Sprinklers

If we lived in a cold climate I would be cleaning up dead debris and heavily mulching the garden, paying extra attention to the perennials.  But, we live in Florida, so we are just starting our Fall gardening season.  I look forward to Fall and will keep you posted on how the gardens are doing.

God bless,
Pam