Some Background

We moved into our house in November of 2005. With a new baby and a kitchen remodel to do we really didn't have time or money to do much with the garden. After a busy winter and spring of work we took the summer off to picnic. As you can see, the yard was quite bare:

The next winter I began to get a hankering to do something with the yard. It really started when the city of Seattle (our fair city) had a tree give-away in the fall. We went to the lot at Magnuson Park hoping to get a tree for our planting strip (that's the little green swath between the sidewalk and the street). Somehow we came away with an Asian Magnolia, Magnolia sieboldii. It's a big enough tree that it needed to go in our back yard but none of the beds were really big enough to accommodate it, so I made a new bed by carving out a bit of the lawn. Well, that got my mind running and with spring coming I began to yearn to turn the yard into something beautiful.

I planted some bulbs in the fall, but I did so somewhat haphazardly and I'm afraid I may have planted some of them too late to give them time to properly sleep (I also made the mistake of storing them indoors). So they're beginning to come up now, but they're tardy and small. No matter--I'm sure they'll be out eventually and after they bloom I'll attempt to relocate them to fit the new plan I'm working up.

Last year we also planted a window box and a friend gave us a lovely hanging basket. They both did pretty well, but a couple of missed waterings and they never quite looked as good as they started. The plants for the window box alone cost $40 at Swanson's, which is a nice place but probably not the cheapest around. So there were two lessons there for us--watering is really important, especially for container plants, and it's expensive to buy plants.

This last story is really important, because it's the primary impetus for this blog. I decided that if I was going to try to do a garden I was going to automate the watering because I'm not good at keeping such a rigorous schedule (what with summer vacations, drought-like conditions in Seattle (honest--that's our summer climate), etc.), and I was going to grow as much as I could from seed. These both require a bit of up-front investment, but my hope is that within a year or two we'll have saved enough money on plants to have made it worthwhile.

So there's a bit of introduction to the project. Look for more details on my experiences with seed starting and drip watering as this blog progresses...