Our 2024 Garden Updates

Here’s what we’ve done in the garden this season!

Every year I do an update about the changes we’ve made in the garden. This is our third update for this house—here are the first two:

• Year 1 updates: Before photos, building the sunroom, adding in landscaping the length of the fence
• Year 2 updates: Adding the first two raised beds, adding a patio, and expanding all of the landscaping

And for year 3…well, we really went off the deep end. I thought it was going to be a chill year! And then we added 5 new raised beds, a 15×15 in-ground garden, a greenhouse, a pond, and a number of fruit trees. We also added more rain barrels and expanded the gravel around the fire pit. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning!

The yard in March 2024

This picture is just a reminder that even when you live in a place with all four seasons, you can start gardening in February! Guess what’s below all this snow? My winter seed sowing! I decided to winter sow things that needed cold stratified (like milkweed and lavender) and also some things that I just wanted to start early (like parsley and other flowers).

I finished a Sustainable Horticulture certificate program this spring, and part of it was completing a hands-on project. I chose winter sowing, and it was pretty neat. Check out the instructions I followed here from the University of Maryland, where I took the classes for the certificate!

The second picture below shows the jugs with seeds in them. The third picture is just after all of the snow melted in the end of March. I was itching to get out there and start planning the raised bed expansion.

Expanding the raised beds

Onto expanding the raised beds. I just purchased more of the Vego beds I use and love for consistency’s take. The first phase of this expansion was to add two deep, large rectangular beds. Then I decided it wasn’t enough, so I ordered three more. A deep kid’s bed and two shallow squares.

A tip on the kids bed—this is a really neat program where you can order the bed and then send a photo of your child in and get a $50 refund! My daughter loved helping to build the bed and planting a tomato plant in it.

To kill off the grass between the beds, we used the same method we’ve used elsewhere around the yard. First we dig out a trench around the perimeter. And then we lay down cardboard—making sure to overlap each piece a bit. And cover with mulch! If you want to plant in the ground, just cut a hole out of the cardboard, plant, and mulch around that.

Below are a few pictures of that process, including some shots of how things looked in early spring. I wrote about the awesome a-frame trellises in this post about early-season updates. They held up very well all season, and I’m still growing on them. Very handy for maximizing space and air flow.

We grew sugar snap peas, many different kinds of tomatoes, malabar spinach, radishes, many different greens, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, herbs, green beans…and I’m sure I’m missing something from this list! We still have beets, greens, radishes, sugar snap peas, and fava beans rollin’ right along for the fall, too.

Adding the in-ground beds

Then, one day, my husband said he wanted to plant asparagus. So we decided on a whim to kill off the grass adjacent to the raised beds area and the concrete pad on the side of the yard. We were able to fit three rows for planting—two rows of asparagus crowns, and a row for whatever else we wanted to plant. I did mostly sweet potatoes this summer and will do a planting of garlic soon.

We did end up removing the grass from the areas we planted in. My preferred method of grass removal is the no-till method of smothering over time with cardboard and mulch, but we wanted to work some compost into this soil and plant right away. We borrowed a gas-powered walk-behind tiller from our neighbor to loosen up the dirt and amend with leaf compost.

We added cardboard and wood chips over the grass to create the paths, though. I accidentally ordered wayyyy more wood chips than we needed, so we ended up with thick paths and wood chips elsewhere in the yard, too.

Building the greenhouse

And in that last photo you can see a concrete pad. That’s for the greenhouse, yay! I do have a post all about Building Our Backyard Discovery Greenhouse that has a lot more info a details. But here are a few shots of the process.

I decided on a concrete pad to keep the area clearly delineated and clean. And I stained it a clay-like color to mimic the clay-like dirt we have here. Adding a greenhouse was truly a dream come true for me, and I couldn’t be happier with how everything turned out. It looks so good in the space, too!

I’ve been settling in and figuring out exactly what I’ll use this for. Propagating some plants so far—hoya and monstera varieties mostly, but also some perennials. I’ll be trying to grow some cold-weather crops throughout the winter in the greenhouse.

Digging a pond

Adding a pond was not on my original list of things I wanted to do this year. But Mike just really wanted to dig. I told him that was his project—I didn’t have the mental bandwith for it, so he just consulted with me on design.

He dug out the pond and used this liner from Lowe’s. We then hit up a local stone yard to get a bunch of different-sized rocks. The waterfall is a solar-powered one, so it isn’t a huge gush of water. It’s just enough.

We expanded the landscaping out so I could plant a bunch of wild-looking native plants around the pond: grasses, coneflowers, lavender, milkweed…I can’t remember what else! We’ll see what comes back next year. And I have to say, this was a GREAT idea. I love the pond now 🙂

Adding fruit trees

This one is technically planned for this year, but as of writing this post, the trees haven’t arrived. We’re planning to fill this area with fruit trees! We already have one plum, one cherry, and one peach that we planted last spring.

We’ve ordered another plum, another cherry, a persimmon, and two paw paw trees. It’s going to be a fruit orchard back here! Oh, and we got 3 more blueberry bushes, 2 raspberry bushes, and 2 blackberry bushes. As of writing this, my husband and I disagree over where the berry patch will go…we’ll see!

Other updates

There are a couple of other miscellaneous things we did, too. This whole area was a weedy mud pit between the concrete pad and the fence. I pulled as many weeds as I could and removed as many rocks as possible (this area was previously landscaped with rock).

Then I sprinkled compost and zinnia seeds I saved from last year, as well as a few sunflowers. Once the seeds sprouted, I thinned them out and meticulously laid cardboard down around all of the seedlings I didn’t pull. And remember that order of wood chips I accidentally over-ordered? I laid them down THICK to suppress the seeds. And it turned out gorgeous!

Until next year…

I’ll probably do a bit more perennial splitting and planting this fall before it gets too cold, and of course experimenting with growing cold-weather crops outdoors and playing around with growing in my new greenhouse. For the most part, though, consider this a wrap on the 2024 growing season. It has been a busy one 🙂

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