As any parent can tell you, in many ways, having a baby allows you to look at the world all over again from the perspective of a child. Everything is fresh and new, and full of wonder. And so it is with the eyes of children that this year my husband and I are embarking on an urban backyard garden experiment. We don’t know much about what we’re doing, but we have a lot of loving support from more knowledgeable friends and family members, Seattle is a great gardening community with lots of resources, and we get to experience the fun of seeing the garden fresh through the eyes of our child (she’s 7 months old).

We purchased a townhome just over a year ago in a fairly urban part of Seattle, and one of the selling points was definitely the fact that it had a matchbox of a backyard we could call our very own. The first project was to get rid of most of the lawn, which was pretty much all that was back there when we bought it. (Down with monocultures!) My husband, along with my brother-in-law - who will feature prominently in my posts for Gardenaut as he provides us with a lot of practical gardening and construction knowledge - ripped up a bunch of the lawn, got some paving stones, and set to work building a patio in a portion of the space.

At the end of last summer, when I was getting pretty unwieldy from being largely pregnant, we decided that the edges of the yard needed some more shrubbery. I’d recently developed an interest in native plants of the area, so we went to a little nursery with mostly native plants grown on Vashon Island and purchased several little plants: two native rhododendrons, two evergreen huckleberries, several sword ferns, two wax myrtles, and two azaleas.


And the crown on the whole thing is the little Douglas maple that our brother-in-law gave us. We’ve named him Dougie. He’s almost like a pet. Especially since he was rather scraggly and sad-looking when we got him (purchased for $5 by said wonderful brother-in-law at a plant sale), so imagine our surprise when he budded and bloomed in full glory this spring, with so many leaves his branches are actually pulled down a bit by the weight.

Then, over the winter (you’ve got to love the mild Seattle winters that permit this kind of project to happen) we fashioned a raised bed in the sunniest portion of the yard. And it is in and around this bed that my gardening tales of Summer 2009 will take place. We’re newbies, and I’d imagine there might be quite a lot of error to our trial and error, but I’m looking forward to journeying through it on this blog. I’m certain I’ll be coming here seeking advice, tips, and help. I’m also certain I’ll be coming here when we have success, so I can tell you just how we managed it, and maybe even provide some food for thought on some topics that might be new to readers.


So far, we’ve planted just a few things in the bed - a spicy salad mix, peas, and some onions. And we’ve got a few starts coming up (fast!) indoors in a seed tray, including black beauty zucchini, butternut squash, leeks, onions, cucumbers, Italian roasting peppers, and jalapeno peppers. I’ll write more about our plans for the raised bed in my next post.

I’m also working on flowers everywhere - in a half-whiskey barrel near our back door, in the soil around the edges of the raised bed, in the soil around the native shrubs mentioned above, and in a few more hanging pots along the fence behind the raised beds. More about these endeavors too in posts to come!




So that’s us. A small family on the edge of Seattle, making the most of the matchbox of earth outside our back door, and embracing this urban gardening adventure with a child’s sense of wonder.