So much time has been spent gardening and sprucing and I never seem to document it so here you go!
Here be the vegetable garden! Corn, bell peppers, bush beans, broccoli, sunflowers, garlic, onions, and zucchini were all started. About 6 zucchinis have been eaten in a number of ways and were great! Those plants have now died in the Texas sun. The corn started and we even had some little ears but, once again, heat burned them to a brown crisp. It turns out that the onions and the garlic were not planted at the appropriate time so they were also pulled.
We’ve eaten 3 green peppers from the garden. I’m hoping for zillions as this is a staple in our house. The plants have gotten much bigger and are flowering again so I’m hopeful.
The sunflowers went in at Sadie’s request. They were beautiful but did not follow what we had read about them- that their name comes from their flower following the sun throughout the day. Ours would rather peak over the fence into our neighbor’s window. When they passed, we cut them down (hearty, tree-like fellows!) and found where the seeds come from (inside the center of the flower). Not sure when to harvest them as both of our long past flowers had big shells but virtually no seed in side.
The next bush bean planting will be several more plants. They are delicious and we made a great stir fry with our first harvest of them. They, too, appear to be working on a second round.
This is the back left corner of our yard. The kids call it ‘the bird corner’ because this is where the bird feeders and bath are and, thus, where the multitudes of mourning doves and house sparrows eat, bathe, and socialize. We also dug a backyard pond which contains hornwort and anacharis (plants) for pond aeration and 3 feeder goldfish that have grown tremendously. There are other water plants that may do more next year than this.
This is the front left corner of the backyard and the final product of the digging of the doggie doo composter (an absolute bear of a job to dig in Texas clay soil- just ask Chris). It is working well. No more plastic bags of poop going in the garbage (2 big dogs make a lot of poop). No smell (I was worried as the heat came that we would become the fragrant home). No bugs. It will make a world of difference next year for our perennial beds which are sorely in need of some nutrients. To the right is an herb garden that we made inside of a tire that the kids and I removed from the drainage area and rolled home. The herbs are all potted because they are pervasive and there is potential for the chemicals from the rubber to leach into their roots should they be directly potted in the tire. Here we have cilantro (killed from the heat while we were in Disney and replaced by thyme (you can never have too much of that 
, sweet marjoram, and basil.
This tire (recovered the same day from the drainage area) sits to the left of the in-ground composter and houses lemon balm, peppermint, and curled parsley.
Standing by the gate (at the herb tires/composter), this is the view of the sideyard to the bird corner.
These are two patio/pool shots. There are perennial beds all around the pool which will require more watering (we were cutting back) because they are definitely not as beautiful as last year. There is also a shallow box in the far back right corner with 6 strawberry plants (the kids were eating one every few days but I’ve read that they yield very little the first year) and 2 early girl tomato plants (a tremendous amount of tomatoes were eaten while we were in Disney either by caterpillars, rats, or both. We managed to eat one- delicious- and have two more now almost ready for harvest. Elijah says he will not eat tomatoes from a store ever again. They’re disgusting! Agreed.
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