Monked & Fifed: My Front Yard Farm

This saturday afternoon, I have secured my mum to babysit the littles while I attend a free seminar at a local county garden on, well...gardening! The talk is being given by a local gardening inspiration, Wendy, the Front Yard Farmer. She had been giving a talk right here in town a couple of weeks ago, but alas, I was unable to attend, what with my Mister's wisdom tooth/ head injury debacle. Poor guy!

The best place to begin a story is at the begining... While we have a "corner lot" {which is a bit larger than many of our neighbors' properties}, it is still a little on the small side when we have considered trying to plant a garden while still allowing room for our littles to play. The other issue has always been that the back yard is nicely shaded, which is wonderful for relaxing, but not so much for growing veggies! The front yard, on the other hand, gets loads of sun...the idea has been nagging at me for some time.

*************
You may already have noticed that I'm kind of a...not so much "all-or-nothing"...more of a "Go-Getter"? When I get {what I consider to be} a good idea in my mind, it is really hard for me to write it off. {Like the Chickens it took me a year to finally get!} Persistence pays off because this year, I am getting my little front yard farm! At present, we have a brick patio in the space where the garden will be and a border of perennial shrubbery. The shrubbery will be transplanted a short distance to the center front of the house {where they are very much needed!} and the bricks will be used to finish the walkway we have in the back yard.

Savvy thing that I am, I rationalized that with the $ we saved on NOT buying more bricks, we could purchase posts, chicken wire + even a pretty little arbor with a gate {much like the one photographed above} for the front of our little farm! Our actual garden will be half the size of this one shown, but it will give us enough room for atleast 2 really nice sized vegetable beds. This week, my Mister is on "Stay-cation" from work + we plan to build our farm. I should say that while I am hoping to learn alot from the Front Yard Farmer at this seminar + the manual labor of building is covered, we aren't going this completely alone as my step-father is a wonderful gardener. I'm willing to take all the help + advice I can get though. To me, the only thing worse than a visible failed garden {and what can be more visible than the front yard!} is chipped red fingernail polish! However, I think that it will be a huge success because of the help that we have + the investment that we are making by jumping in with both feet. So I hope that you will excuse me if my posts are a bit less frequent this next week...I'm so excited to get moving on our project and am looking foward to posting what we have completed asap!