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nora

nora's Backyard garden

Garden Type: Backyard | Sun: Partial Sun | Soil: Clay I'm Organic!

Our backyard started out as a a fairly narrow rectangle, with a bumpy uneven slope towards the back. A large freestanding 3-car garage blocked most of the backyard view from the house, and a ridiculous amount of asphalt leading from the street to the garage took up a lot of useful land. We got rid of the garage and the long driveway, installed a short gravel drive, a back deck along the length of the house and a bluestone patio. We then took advantage of the natural slope of the land to divide the back into an upper garden and a lower garden, smoothing out the grade where necessary. (We needed help from a landscaping company for this bit.) The lower back garden became a grass-filled oval, bordered by trees, shrubs and perennials, creating (or attempting, anyway) separate garden spaces off the oval. The upper lawn we turned into a more formal space, bisecting it from the lower garden with a yew hedge with a 12 ft wide centre opening. The upper lawn contains our deck and patio and is bordered by 2 deep perennial beds. I also have 2 espaliered apple trees growing against the deck.

A row of 100yr old pines along our back border sucks a huge amount of moisture out of the soil and extends a thick tangle of roots quite far into our land, making it a bit difficult to grow things in much of the lower garden (did I mention the pines are about 100-125 ft tall?.) On the plus side, the pines also provide a home for lots of birds and provide us with bountiful amounts of pine needles (great mulch!).

We garden organically, and have tried to plant shrubs, trees and perennials that both attract birds and beneficial insects and also please us. Over the past 8 years that we’ve been gardening, we really noticed a huge change in our tiny 1/3 acre in the Boston suburbs. About 2 years after we went totally organic, I noticed that we quite suddenly had far more beneficial insects and fewer pests than before (though mosquitos and japanese beetles are a constant!). We now have a lot more butterflies (I saw a Kerner blue butterfly last week!) than ever, and I’ve spotted no fewer than 5 different species of woodpecker from our back deck. Not to mention that going chemical-free and reducing the size of our lawn cut both our water bill and our garden center bills.

Of course the garden isn’t anywhere near finished yet, and I’m constantly making mistakes, or fixing old gardening mistakes, or forgetting when exactly is the best time to prune and/or fertilize what, but thankfully Nature seems fairly flexible. When worse comes to worst, there’s always next year!

I’ll try uploading some garden pics, but am still a technical novice.*

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Lexington, MA

United States United States 6

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