Gardening Year 1

This is our first summer in our new house, and our first year to plant a garden. Our yard is all up-hill...very little flat land, which is typical for our city.  Red clay is also typical, instead of lovely black topsoil.  So we bought a load (DUMP TRUCK LOAD) of beautiful black dirt, built a couple of raised bed gardens and went to work.  We got everything in the ground right before we left for the beach, and so far it's looking pretty successful. 

This garden houses our corn, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, broccoli, marigolds, sunflowers and onions.

Here is our 2nd raised bed garden.  It houses our green beans, peas, eggplant, zuchinni, cabbage, onions, pumpkins and sunflowers too.   This one is a bit behind garden #1, because quite honestly, we hadn't planned for 2 gardens...but we had (and still have) a lot of dirt left.

We also have cantalopes and cucumbers planted along the sides of the privacy fence.  I figure that way they can run without crowding the veggies in the garden.

The remaining dirt is slowly being worked into my flower beds.  The girls and I finished two flower beds on Friday evening.   Tomorrow I hope to fill in my new flower bed (the flowers aren't new, but the landscaping timbers to box it in are new).  I have irises, peonies and redhot pokers growning there. 

Here are photos of some of my roses, and sweet williams. 

I'm hoping that the girls will be more interested in trying new fruits and veggies since they are helping to plant, tend to and eventually harvest with us.  Lindsey is willing to try most things....but Olivia is a bit more stubborn (read FINICKY).