A new trend- Salad as Landscaping

When we bought our house, we worried about the neighborhood, the schools, the commute and more.  One of the last things I considered was maintaining the landscape!  The VERY first thing we did when we closed on this house was dig a trench through the front yard.  It was mid december, and there was snow on the ground.  Thankfully a close family member just purchased a backhoe, so he hooked us up... Unfortunately, this means that we displaced a lot of landscaping.  Did I ever mention that the previous owner was a landscaper?

So for the past year and a half, we've struggled to decide which projects to do next.  What makes sense?  What can we afford?  What will we later destroy in efforts to fix something else?  What do we need to put minimal effort into because it will be a while before we can really do it right?  Landscaping has mostly fallen into that last category.  Hopefully the downstairs bathroom can be our next priority (once we clean up the mess from the current project, that is, demolition of the illegal sun room off the back of the house...)

When we moved in, the hubby and I discussed the garden.  I need a garden to feel whole.  A garden can be a big commitment, and depending on how it is done, a big expense.  Then my mom bought the kids about $20 in seeds that they chose.  So we both caved... We dug (by hand) a little plot, planted some stuff straight into the dirt, and nutured what we could until the deer ate up 2/3 of our crops.  I also tried to plant a little herb garden behind our roses.  The second bag of compost I opened should have been labeled "mulch."  It was 1" pieces of bark and wood... It was 10:00 at night, I didn't have the energy to return it, so I decied I'd make it work.  I got some sprouts, but within a week, they were gone... At the time, I blamed the dirt, and moved on...



We started with fresh resolve this year, building a better fence with some lumber scraps (and some bought lumber) and some hand me down fencing.  We started tomatoes, peppers, cauliflower and broccoli inside at the end of March.  When the farmers market opened the first week of may I picked up some more varieties of tomatoes, peppers, and the kids BEGGED for lettuce.  How does a mom turn THAT down?  But we had a problem... while we enlarged the garden this year, we had plans for every square inch of it... so where to put the lettuce?  Well, for a week, it sat in a sunny window in the kitchen.  And then it came to us... We bought one more bag of garden soil, filled up the area behind the roses a bit more with nice fresh dirt, and planted those lettuces right in our front flower beds.  I dropped some seeds for green looseleaf and swiss chard in as well.  We discovered that the dirt probably wasn't the issue last year... as the purchased seedlings dug right in, the sprouts we tried to start from seed would disappear about 2 days after we saw them... critters...  The bigger plants didn't seem to attract them, so for now, we'll stick with some already started varieties!

Hopefully we don't get arrested for this front yard implementation.  I'm wondering if we can start a new trend instead.  Tired of pulling weeds?  Lettuces are pretty good for keeping them at bay (or you could just eat your dandelions, they're possibly more nutritious than the domestic leafy greens!)  We interspersed some marigolds for pest prevention.  Artistically arranged our varieties... It's quite possibly the prettiest part of our landscaping... well... like I said, the rest will have to wait for later!