Summer Garden Box

Remember the garden box my kids made me?

It now looks like this:

We have ripe swiss chard, basil, alpine strawberries, chives, cucumbers, and nasturtiums (I eat the flowers in salads).  The radishes, spinach and lettuce are done, and we have squash, tomatoes, carrots, and beets ripening. 

It's how I always dreamed gardening would be!  There is almost no weeding, and I water through a soaker hose, so the "work" is picking things and pulling spent plants.

Which reminds me of the garden I'm not happy with...

And this is the picture after pulling three trash bins of weeds. 

So I've been thinking.  It's taken me two decades of house keeping to figure out how to organize things inside:

1. only keep what you really need or love
2. figure out why things get messy in a particular place
3. figure out what you want the space to do
4. make it as easy as possible to keep it clean

What if I use those principles in the garden? 

1. I've been trying (with little success) to grow food in this garden for years.  Realistically, there's not enough light for fruiting crops like tomatoes.  But if I can get my food from the garden box, I don't need the big garden as a food garden.

2. It's on the side of the house where I rarely go except to garden.  Once it gets super hot and humid, I don't want to be out side.  It's just too big to continually hand weed the space for annual crops, and it's difficult to water the slope.

3. I want it to be beautiful, just less work. I don't want to turn this space back to lawn.  It was super hard to mow this slope, and it was very very hard to turn into garden in the first place.   There are also things in the garden that are working and I want to keep: the herbs are doing well, and the strawberries, raspberries, and three of the fruit trees.

4. What if I put in perennial shrubs and flowers like I did in the shrubbery?  I could even put in some fruiting shrubs because I know they bear fruit here.  If I planted it densely, I wouldn't have to weed much, and I could use it as a cutting garden