Our Garden - Before and After

I live in a small apartment and therefore don't have the option of planting a large garden in the yard.

Thankfully, we are on the bottom level and there is a nice door wall out to the patio and yard and our view is of a large city park with tons of trees. There is a spot under the kitchen window where the grass never grew well so I decided to claim it for our garden years ago. I lined the edge of it with rocks that my husband has collected over the years from all the places he has gone rock climbing, and this year he and our daughter made a three level shelf thing out of tree branches and old closet shelves.

My daughter helped me pick out some flowers and plant them in our containers - the garden area gets sun all day long and with the containers I can move them to the porch for shade if they look like they need it. I also planted a bunch of seeds that we had either bought or saved from last years flowers. I love to stand in the garden and examine each flower and plant to make sure it's growing well - it's very relaxing and rewarding.


At the end of last summer I let the garden die out and this is what it looked like after the winter snow melted. Some of the clay pots were too damaged to reuse, but all the new plastic pots I had bought were in great condition.  

 

 Next, my daughter went with me to the nursery to pick out some flowers and plants and clean out al the pots...

I knew I wanted my hanging basket to have lobelia, vinca vine, and pink geranium - three of my favorites.

 

Last year it rained so much in spring that when I was finally able to plant things I was so excited that I forgot to label the pots. So, I had a lot of pots with mystery seeds and some plants that I bought at Easter Market in Detroit but I replanted them and forgot to transfer the tag. This year we decided to make some garden tags with craft sticks and seal them with Mod Podge. We did this a few years ago and it worked well. We all worked on the tags and used lots of colors trying to make them really cool.

 After finishing the writing for one, I coated in in Mod Podge and it smeared the colors all over. We decided to try coating the finished tags with a clear acrylic spray instead.

The clear acrylic spray appeared to work well until the tags got wet then most of them smeared or washed off all together. Some of the words written in black were still legible. We'll work on those again later...

My husband and daughter jumped the fence to get some fallen branches to make the shelf in the garden.

Time to place all the pots in the garden area!