El Sueno Garden

My husband, Erin, and I just moved to Santa Barbara. It's a great little house with two yards. The first yard, which we call the front yard, is fairly dark and moist and there are a lot of tropical plants. The other yard, which we call the backyard, has a patio and deck and is mostly brick, wood, and wood chips. Neither is entirely suitable for a garden. But, behind the backyard there is a hill which is currently covered in grass and weeds. We've decided to convert this into a garden.

This is our dog, Kai's, favorite place to hang out and graze on grass. It's quite sunny and the soil seems pretty rich. We plan to do our warmer weather crops out here and do the cooler weather crops in planters in the front yard.

We are recycling some lumber that we had lying around to make the planter. Really, it will be a retaining wall, more than a planter. We also plan to lay chicken wire on the bottom, to keep the gophers out, and to make a small chicken wire fence around the planter to keep out rabbits, etc.

This is the result of about a couple hours of weeding:

Erin tackled an enormous rock. ...this is the point where we get slightly nervous that we're compromising the stability of our house. However, we kept on digging .

So far, we've pulled out the soil, put the boards in, layed down the chicken wire along the bottom, put the soil back in, and made a walkway. Well done for a day's worth of labor.