You can see from the photo how drab and empty the front yard is. My excuse is that last summer was our first summer here and it was spent hand gardening a 1/2 acre. Now I did pull out shrubbary before this photo, but trust me, it wasn't great. This a before photograph, published here for that purpose of documenting a make over. This is the before pictures of our lawn's liberation. You can see the trees haven't even started to leaf out here.
What is awesome is that I went to the local plant nursary and asked for an Espalier fruit tree not really expecting that they would have any, but the owner said, "wow, these came off the truck and I said, "what the ... I didn't order this!" So, we bought two Espalier gala apples - they were destined to be ours. When Mr. Greenjeans met the Espeliars in person, the light went on, and I believe we will be forging full speed ahead into Espalier trees.
I am fairly paralized about the big picutre. The front yard is north facing but we have great east and west sun and the side yard does get southern sun.
Today Chibi and I planted Gladiolas (yes the flowers went in first while I'm plotting the big picture), I top dressed the soil where the shrubs were evicted with rabbit manure, and DH sawed wood for the potato... house.. er condo... I'm going to try the potatoe feature that I learned about over at Rob's world. We want raised beds, and as much fruit as we can get in the ground these first years (last year we planted 4 fruit trees and 3 survived) as well as neighbor appeasing landscaping. I want to work with the neighbors so that instead of being put off by the strange and new approach to landscaping, they too may consider planting useful and edible things.
6 comments:
Careful there, rev... you might be turning radical! You should like the espalier trees... I was considering them but saw the columnars and thought- wow the ultimat in lazy orchard managment and went with ground sticks.
Yay! Espaliers! My favorite! I'm so glad you found some! Where are you going to put them?
Rob,
The danger lurks.
Becca, glad you stopped by I have learned a lot about Espaliers from your site - including that my local place might just have them.
I've been planting fruit trees and berries in my front yard too. I've been so wrapped up in the animals, I haven't posted anything about the plants.
I just ripped out the rest of my front yard last fall and am in the process of planting veggies and pollinator flowers there now. Stumbled upon an espaliered pear tree (5 in 1!) last week and it was love at first sight. :) Peppers are nice out front. As are potatoes. Swiss chard. I'll post a photo of my front yard once things start growing but so far, I'm really happy. I put in an arbor, fence and walkway and have a grape on one side of the arbor, cucumber on the other. We'll see how it goes. :) Happy planting.
It is a revolution, rev, rip and plant. Our front yard is mostly planter beds.
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