Texas spring garden time is one of my favorite times of year. When our purple pin-cushion flowers start blooming, we know spring is here! There is always so much to do to get ready for spring gardening. Cleaning out the gardens, adding compost, trimming trees and bushes, adding mulch, and repairing sprinklers are all part of the preparation for planting.
We try to plant immediately after Easter and are usually running late. However, this years pandemic actually helped us to be ready for planting on time. The stay-at-home recommendation resulted in more time to garden and gardening has been an excellent way to spend the time. We did miss going to Wildseed Farms in Fredericksburg, hopefully we’ll be ok to go later this year.
Our yard is fairly small, but we are able to pack a lot into the space. Each area of the yard gets a few new plants every year. The front yard is mainly flowers, trees, bushes, grass and trees. The side yard is the bird area and is bushes and flowers. The back yard is divided into herbs, flowers, and raised beds for vegetables. The back porch is primarily flowers and herbs.
Front Yard
The purple pin cushion flowers have gone crazy this year. It is our best growing plant in the yard. It requires very little maintenance, very little water, blooms like crazy and doesn’t seem to attract pests. (that is why you see so much of it in our yard). The purple Henry Duelberg salvia bushes on the side of the yard are also a favorite. They are great bushes, drought and deer resistant. The plants are also low maintenance, except for pruning after winter and mid-summer.
Side Yard
The side yard is our birding area and the birds love the nice sheltered area. We are in the process of adding a small rock garden to this area. We can’t resist picking up rocks when we go down to our family land, so we decided to give the rocks their own space. (A picture of the side yard will be posted later, after we finish the rock garden).
Back Yard, Herbs and flowers
We love playing and trying new plants in the back yard. We have a half-circle garden (bottom of above picture) that we re-did for this year. Last year it was flowers from seeds and no mulch. It was beautiful while we had flowers, but hard to weed and not as pretty when the flowers died out. We decided to mulch this garden and go with a few more plants and a few less plants from seeds. So far, we like the start to the garden. Can’t wait to see this garden in another month.
There is a fun selection of herbs on the right side of the back yard. Everyone told us not to plant mint in the garden, but we didn’t listen. The mint took over three other herb areas, so we dug it up and now we only grow mint in pots. We do have dill, sage, bee balm, rosemary, and several other herbs in the yard.
The climbing rose bush on the back fence was just a mound of ‘roses’ on the ground last year. We decided to tie the rose to the trellis this year and see how it grows. So far it is beautiful.
Back Yard, raised Bed Gardens
We have three raised garden beds for vegetables. Growing vegetables in raised garden beds is definitely the way to go. The raised garden beds are easier to plant, water, and weed. Last year, we over planted the raised beds and couldn’t walk down the paths between the beds or get in between plants to gather the produce. So we decided to plant fewer items further apart this year. We’ll know in a few months how that works out.
The garden at the bottom of the picture has a swiss chard and several ichaban egg plants. The white covers are actually trash cans from the dollar store that we use for a wind break. The big swiss chard came back from last year. The other swiss chard are still seeds in the ground and are not coming up yet.
The middle garden has a large sunflower that came up volunteer from last year, two tomato plants, an eggplant, and several seeds of lunch box peppers
The last garden is another sunflower , 2 more tomatoes, and okra seeds on one end.
We also planted marigold seeds around the edge of all three gardens. Marigold plants are supposed to help keep garden pest away. We’ll let you know in a few months how this idea works. Last year we tried yellow sticky papers to catch pests, but a baby mockingbird got his tail stuck to the sticky paper. We saved the bird and threw away the sticky papers.
Back Porch
The back porch is actually my favorite part of the garden right now. Containers full of herbs or flowers are easy to grow. We planted lots of Zinnia seeds in one of the larger carts this year and the seeds are already sprouted! Several of the porch plants were overwintered in our little plastic green house so we didn’t have to start over this year for all of the porch plants.
We hope you have enjoyed a few pictures. We’ll post more in a few months when all the seeds come up. We would love to see garden pictures from all of you! Happy Gardening!
Here’s a few links to some of our other gardening post: