Weekend Update--a long overdue Trailer Park Homestead Update

I know I've been slacking lately!  I'm sorry.  Bad, bad, bad blogger.  No cookie for me.  Okay, I haven't exactly been slacking, since I've still been busy as heck with working out, kids' sports and activities, getting my garden in, homeschooling the herd, and who knows what else, but I haven't been blogging nearly enough.  I'm working on improving that, but in the meantime, here is the product of some of my hard work:  my entire garden is IN!  These pictures are actually from a couple days ago, but they are pretty much the same as what's out there now, so the time delay on getting them up is more or less irrelevant. 

This is the front of our house.  The flowers in the front look like they are going to actually do something this year to make my landscaping look a little more "normal".  The middle area has snap peas and cabbage, the barn wood facade (hiding the bright orange buckets the park manager hated so much last year) area has alternating tomato and zucchini plants.  It looks like the berry bushes (left corner) will have an actual crop this year as well!

This picture, taken from the driveway, shows my entire front yard!  In addition to what you could see in the last picture, the "herb garden", which also contains carrots, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli, and onions is also visible, as is the front garden box area.

 In the front garden bed, I have onions, cauliflower, carrots (probably ready for harvest, since they overwintered there), beans, tomato, and I planted cantaloupe, but it hasn't come up yet, so I may give up soon and stick something else in that spot.  In the containers surrounding the box, I have spinach, snap peas, lettuce, onions, and another tomato.

In the front stairwell/patio area, I have snap peas and strawberries on the stairs themselves and tomatoes poised to use the stair's rails as supports.  Off to the side, I have ground cherries planted, but they are doing really badly this year, so I may need to replant or move them until they get bigger so the rain coming off the roof doesn't keep killing them.

Okay, this isn't food (although it could be if we were hungry enough, I suppose), but this is a really cool homeschool science experiment going on directly behind the front stairs.  Our sand and water table got a little flooded, so we stuck some tadpoles I got from the Broccoli Lady in there so the kids could watch them develop in something pretty close to a natural habitat.  I probably should replace the sand in there and sanitize the whole things once they've grown up and hopped out though.

If I had a FAQ page, one of the things on there would probably be "if pretty much your whole yard is garden, where do the kids play?"  This would be part of the answer.  Positioned right outside the back door, this play area for the littles is also popular with older kids as well.  It didn't cost a fortune to put together either, since the sandbox and picnic table are both Freecycle finds from a few years ago and the slide/tent thing was an early birthday present for my youngest.

I haven't put much in the driveway, but I figured I could at least stick out this planter I got for the banana tree that I'll eventually (hopefully) be growing.  The seeds haven't even germinated yet (I've mentioned that could take months, right?  I'm still considering contacting the company I got them from for a replacement since it seems like they ought have done something by now!), so, for now, I have a tomato plant and a few cantaloupes in there.  I figure a 30-gallon pot ought to be able to support that much, since each of those plants "only" needs a 5-gallon container.

In what I was calling the "St. Patty's bed" last year (because I planted it on St. Patrick's Day last year), I have winter squash (I need to get a trellis for that to grow up on!), broccoli, onions, and carrots.  I also have a cute little lawn ornament that I was able to get almost for free with coupons.  Woohoo!  A little past here, between the AC unit and the back door, I have a mini bed just of different kinds of peppers (cayenne, bell, and jalapeno), but that is too weedy to show right now.  I also have a small container of beans poised to grow up the back stairs railing.

Finally, in the back of the house, I have my back garden bed, consisting of tomatoes, bell peppers, broccoli, beets, watermelon, and spinach, and a few new beds (last year's failed potato condo has been reincarnated) containing watermelon and the last of the mini-corn I had left over from last year.