Pomerleau Family Blog: Building a garden and rennovating our backyard ourselves

Ever since we moved into our house, I had been talking about possibly renovating our backyard and adding some new flowers and shrubbery. I also was thinking about getting a planter box so we could plant some vegetable and fruit in our backyard. I didn't know a thing about planting stuff and gardening so I started doing some research on the internet. My mother in law Pam is also an avid gardener and gave me great advice. I ended up buying a planter called Gronomics that they sell at Costco (so I was able to review the reviews and knew it was good quality) and ended up finding it cheaper at Home Depot. I ended up staining it myself with a safe stain for planting that was all organic to help protect the cedar. That took several days to do the two coats on both sides. Then Sean and Brandon put the planter together for me.

Sean rotatilling the area where we will put the planter

I was talking to Sean's parents over Easter weekend about some ideas for making our backyard look better. We had the area where the playground was built leveled out and the extra dirt was placed underneath the tree (to save quite a bit of money). That area was looking muddy and grass and other weeds were starting to grow everywhere. Sean's dad had the idea of de-weeding that whole area, laying a landscaping fabric down, and then cutting holes in that where we wanted to plant shrubs and other flowers and then laying mulch down over all of it. It sounded like a lot of work but then I just decided to do it one day! Home Depot was having a crazy sale on the mulch 6 bags for $10 of the good quality Scott's brown mulch and I just kept on accumulating them until I had about 50 bags.

I also did a lot of research and began accumulating fruit and vegetable plants. I got two blueberry bushes to plant in the sunny area under the trees. I ended up getting several flower bushes and lily plants. I got two flower vines that will grow up a trellis. We found a bunch of trellises that were left at our house from the prior owner. We also got 4 Azalea bushes, 2 large rhodys that liked to grow under trees and were in good in partial shade. I borrowed my neighbor's mini rototiller and Sean and I rototilled the weeds up in the area underneath the trees. That got all the weeds up and the soil ready to plant. We also rototilled the grass underneath where we were installing the planter box. We filled the planter box up with organic soil and both Brandon and Olivia helped me plant. We planted two raspberry bushes (one on the side of the house) and one in a large pot, 3 blend lettuce in a pot next to the planter. In our planter, we planted a tomato bush, carrot seeds, bell peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, and baby broccoli. The kids were so excited to watch their vegetables grow! We planted 2 pots full of tomato bushes in a pot on the patio, a jalapeno and sweet yellow pepper in a pot, sage, oregano, basil, mint, and parsley in herb pots, and several pots of strawberries in a strawberry pot that was left, in a big pot, and then one that hangs on our tree. The kiddos love their strawberries and that way we can see where they grow best in our yard.

Our aftermath after planting

Brandon was my big helper

The next weekend, we laid down the landscaping fabric and I planted the bushes and plants on Friday. Then Sean helped me lay down all the mulch which took all afternoon. When we were all done it looked so good! It was so hard and took me about 3-4 weeks of solid work but we love our backyard now. It really makes our house. We just installed a screen door from the kitchen to the backyard so we can enjoy being outside more and to help prevent the kids from letting in bugs when they go outside. So, so happy with our backyard now and so happy it is all done. I will do a blog update once we are actually bearing fruit and vegetables.