Looking Back at 2021! 🌿❤️🥰 // Garden Answer

hey guys how's it going it is the last day of 2021 so i thought it would be fun to sit down and run through this past year talk about everything that happened around here a lot of changes happened in the garden a lot of changes happened in aaron in my personal life our family life it's just been it's been a crazy year when i actually sit down and think about it or look outside and kind of realize everything that that happened yeah it's just fun to look back and i wanted to do that before we get into the new year so i'm just going to start with the very first great big thing that happened to us in 2021 and that was on january 18th our daughter samantha grace was born 802 or 803 in the morning i think 9 pounds 14 ounces she is our second baby so we have benjamin who was born january 12th so they have a six day six days in between their birthdays but he had just turned three i look back at pictures like when we very first brought her home and his face and how different he looks right now like we are approaching his fourth birthday he has changed so much in the span of this year um and it's been it's been an adjustment but not as big of an adjustment as having benjamin you know aaron and i were married for 12 years before we had benjamin and we were pretty used to life and the rhythm of our life and um so that was a lot to get used to and when we uh had samantha grace i actually felt a lot more comfortable because i felt like i had a little bit more of a grasp on what to expect you know before benjamin i had never changed a diaper before ever i had never really held a newborn that i could remember like everything was foreign to me and so as samantha grace i felt more natural and she just fit right in benjamin didn't he didn't skip a beat he just loved her from the very beginning and they love each other i mean they give hugs all the time and kisses to each other and they play and it's just the cutest thing so when we had samantha though i thought well this year i'm just going to kind of write it off a little bit because you know getting used to having another baby in the house taking time to enjoy her and and such i just figured we wouldn't get as much done but boy was i wrong so the next big thing that happened was in the same month this january i have a list in front of me with some dates uh january 30th our big pine trees were were removed so the two big pines that were next to our gazebo one of them had blight really badly and blight is something that once it's got the damage you can't really reverse that damage you can keep it from spreading but that pine looked pretty darn bad so it looked brown all of the time the one right next to it we thought well what if we remove the one and leave the other one well they were so grown together that it would have looked really odd that one would wouldn't have branches on the one side where that the blight ridden one was also we were prepping the area to get ready to put in our hartley greenhouse and we had decided to actually pull the trigger on that purchase i think it was the last week of the prior year or the first week of january right in there we we had to make the decision because i think pricing was going to go up or something like that we thought well if we want to do it we need to do it now so we thought we don't want disease-ridden trees right next to a beautiful glass greenhouse so january 30th they happened to have an opening in their schedule which i didn't really have time to prep for i mean 12 days after having a baby and so i'm like all over the place anyway and here they come with their big equipment and take down the pines it was a little bit of a bittersweet moment i was excited for what was going to happen i was sad for the loss of shade and structure in our garden but knowing going forward we'd be able to choose the things that we wanted in that space and make it make it ours so that was a that was a pretty big deal february 5th so just a few days after that we gave away our little tool shed which sat right underneath the pine trees it was a sweet little shed however the door never worked very well you had to kind of kick it to get inside and we had stored you know benjamin's little pool this little wading pool uh a slide his bike that sort of thing was a great toy storage area and i had tried to think of different things to do with that little shed i thought about maybe building a living roof on the top of it but the placement where it was at in a position in relation to where the hartley was going to be i thought that's too close we're either going to need to move it out to the new property or we actually gave it to some friends of ours who have a farm outside of town and they are they're starting this thing where they do events out there and they kind of have like this not petting zoo sort of feel but they've got a whole bunch of really neat animals and they yeah they just they sell some things from their farm anyway we thought that they could use the tool shed i think they use it as bunny housing now which is a great way to repurpose that tool shed and it was really nice to see them come in and the way people's minds work to get like that big tool shed it was so heavy i mean it was built a long time ago with really thick materials um but when you have people especially like ben is his name he grew up on a farm and they just have a specific mindset and they know how to move things without wrecking everything else so they got it out and you could barely even tell it had been there so anyway that was another big change and then there was about a month gap so february 5th the tool shed left march 6th we planted our orchard now a lot of things happened in between but i just kind of wanted to hit on the bigger things i mean we did tons of planting we did tons of little projects tons of seed starting oh my word lots of seed starting went down in here both in the studio and a lot in the greenhouse and that was really fun but kind of want to focus on the big stuff so march 6th we planted i think was it nine two four six eight nine nine orchard trees so we did two apples a fuji and a honeycrisp two peaches an alberta and a snow beauty white two apricots a tilton and a heart hot we're gonna have to remove the tilton because it has canker and then we did a santa rosa plum flavor top nectarine and a red bartlett pear and i was just so excited to get those in because i think a lot of the things because like i said i kind of written the year off as like we're just going to kind of maintain we're going to maintain what we've got going on here maybe improve some of the flower beds but i didn't really expect a lot of big things to happen so getting the orchard in was a real treat and i we left that spot in the middle for the cut flower shed at that time when we planted the fence wasn't in there we had that fence built so back behind the orchard there's a six foot tall a solid cedar fence that we stained a black and then in front so like from the sides of it going forward there's picket like our raised bed garden near the house so it kind of mirrors that a little bit that's also stained black and that kind of makes a room makes the orchard into a room and i wanted it to feel kind of cozy i'm going to well you guys know later on in the year i planted thousands of bulbs in that orchard space i want it to feel kind of meadow-ish and the cut flower shed of course is is coming along as well um so yeah getting those orchard trees in was awesome and we actually got fruit off of them i don't thin the first year because i don't have patience for for waiting so we did enjoy quite a number of different fruits from the orchard on march 15th about a week later we went in with black mulch and spread it in all the walkways in the cut flower garden or almost all of them um we had prior to even the orchard going in we had gone in and marked off the corners of everything so we did all of our measuring based off the exterior fence that runs on the east and south side of that the property in that corner so we measured in and i had on a piece of paper you know how many feet i wanted everything to be so like the orchard is 90 i can't remember off the top of my head but i think it's 90 feet wide and maybe 35 feet deep all the walkways are 15 feet wide and then our cut flower garden the quadrant so there's four quadrants um they're more or less a rectangle shape there's a little notch in the center where we're going to do some things but they're roughly 60 by 40. and then the walkways like i said are all 15 feet all the way around the exterior and the interior and even though we are planning on putting grass there we wanted to put something down to help keep the dust down the dust was so bad out there because i mean taking a raw piece of property and making it into what it is now it takes a lot of infrastructure work and just a lot of time to get it to get it kind of buttoned up so we dealt with a lot of dust and the mulch helped tremendously and it really created a i think like from i don't know if we got any aerial shots of that but it um i'm sure we did but it really helped kind of distinguish where everything was at and then on march 20th we went out and ran drip in the flower garden and showed you how we were going to do that because we did adjust based on the prior years growing out in that space it's in a different location because you know the first year we had the property i just plunked the flower garden like kind of right out in the middle just like this this spot's good let's just plant stuff here it was a tremendous success but we did learn a lot through the process because not everything was successful but most of it was i learned that i needed to compartmentalize some things i needed to put crops that didn't want as much moisture in different rows i couldn't put those in the same row as something else that needed more i don't know what i was thinking i mean that seems like a kind of thing to to mess up but you know when you're just throwing stuff out there and kind of hoping for the best sometimes you just you know throw it all out there anyway so we learned that those sorts of things i also learned about drip tape that was a first my first experience using drip tape and so we had both tape with six inch uh emitters spacing and 12 inch emitter spacing and the six inch emitter spacing worked so much better we ended up pulling up all the 12 inch spacing which i had used in the dahlia area particularly because i spaced my dahlias 12 inches apart and i thought well that's perfect so efficient it just wasn't enough for those dahlias so um we ended up putting the six inch emitters in and it worked so much better so that's what we used 100 in the new garden was a six inch spacing so learning those things and also putting in valves at the beginning of every run of drip tape to where you could turn each one of them off was such a great thing so anyway we kind of went over all those pieces and parts and showed you how we were trying to improve our system which we will still try to improve years going forward on march 29th the next day i planted some of our first seeds in the cut flower garden which i was so excited to do is a little bit of a lob because i didn't know i didn't know how it was going to turn out out there it's so exposed you know there's nothing protecting anything out there and i thought well just put these out here and see what happens and then we proceeded to have one of the windier days that i could ever remember and i thought that all my seeds had just blown away i went out and tried to put landscape fabric down over the top of all the rows that i had just planted and weigh them down with bricks but the wind was so bad like it was picking the landscape fabric up and like almost moving me with it it was like creating a kite and there was dust blowing everywhere and i thought well my seeds are probably all blown everywhere anyway because they're only buried you know an eighth to a quarter of an inch deep um but most of them ended up coming up on april 7th we toured you around the garden just to give you updates on what was going on we titled it april garden tour the good the bad the ugly which i think was appropriate because we had a little bit of all of it in that uh at that time um all good things though because they all were things that needed to happen to get us toward our end goal and it's hard it's hard to be in the middle of those projects sometimes and feel like your whole life is an upheaval i mean here we are uh april 7th what we've had samantha for just a few months so we were just still like kind of reeling a little bit really tired all the time and adjusting and then your garden is just a total wreck and you have open trenches everywhere there were a couple moments where i was like oh my goodness no more projects for a while but most days i was just so thrilled and excited to see how everything was going to come together so that was the first time we had really good aerial footage of the trenches going on and those at that time the trenching had already been done around the exterior of the new property that was done the prior year but this time it was on the interior of where the new lawn is the big lawn that we have up front um so there was a trench along where our old driveway was at this time april 7th too we had the new driveway was put in that had been kind of formed there for a while at that point so where the old driveway was there was a trench and then along the exterior it kind of followed the new lane where the new lane is and then there was also a trench leading up to the house because we had a frost rehydrate put in right up there because we had no water access up there through the winter prior to that on april 24th so 7th to the 24th a lot of planting i'm guessing happened between there i'd have to look back we do so many projects like i said when you post every day you're at least showing something you're working on in each video there's a lot that that goes down but on the 24th we had the biggest dust devil it's kind of funny that we honed in on this but it was the biggest dust devil i have ever seen we were out spreading mulch again in the cut flower garden area and it just whipped through and it wrecked like it bent one of our high tunnel one of the bows and ripped the plastic off of it and it just created a little bit of dusty chaos there for a minute and it was just like that just shows you how windy of a spring we had this year it was the whole year actually was windy it was windier than any other year that i can ever ever remember and for us i mean we get extremes in in terms of cold and heat sometimes i mean you know our summers we are 100 plus for several weeks and like we're expecting negative four degree temperature i just checked the forecast right before we sat down negative four in a couple of days and we've been a little lower than that but the other thing that we get is either hail or wind and i just when wind comes through i just never know what to expect what kind of mess it's going to create and i know that you know that's not as bad as living in an area where you get hurricanes and tornadoes and things like that but it was just a tremendously windy windy windy year on april 26th i had kind of like the last ditch effort to go up front and remove some of the perennials that i wanted to keep and transplant them not too many days after that on may 4th i gave you another update on kind of the same area to show you what the front yard looked like at that point because they had finished pretty much like smoothing it out and the takeaway was done on may 6th we planted 21 big trees on the new property so the south garden is what we're calling it i guess now what we try to do though especially for planting big items if we can get them all in kind of the same time frame we rent a skid steer with a three foot auger it makes planting time so much quicker because we have hard pan out there pretty intense hard pan it is it is really difficult to dig holes with a shovel so if we have 21 big trees it's worth our time to rent an auger because we can just zip zip zip paul went along and zipped all the holes right where we needed them to be and then we just got them planted a lot of them were in the great big cages you know the big metal cages with the plastic kind of on the interior of the cage so we planted some forest pansy redbuds we planted corinthian lindens a big scotch pine uh three blue spruces uh renaissance birch i'm not gonna remember all of them a katsura tree anyway a bunch of beautiful trees a really really great start on the new property and that's probably what we're going to try to do this spring again we'll kind of get a big group of trees we'll rent a big auger and we'll get it done quickly may 24th was the day the gazebo was removed and that was somewhat of a bittersweet moment because even though the gazebo wasn't my favorite it didn't fit in with the style i was kind of going for with the garden and we had thought about is there a way that we could paint it or kind of redo the beams or redo the roof or something like that and make it fit in but you know we decided to put the hartley in so it just everything was falling into place and then we decided that we would contact the city and see if they had any use for the gazebo um and they jumped at the opportunity because even though they hired a company company to come remove it so the professionals to move it it was way cheaper to come and get our gazebo and construct it at a park than it was to buy a brand new one so they were excited about it it's actually downtown in our city in a little park where a hotel used to stand and it just looks beautiful they have it all installed there and they change the beams out to thicker beams so it looks more appropriate than it did when it was here uh anyway so that was the day that that happened and that was just a really interesting process to watch to see what they did you know because they took the roof in one piece and cut the beams that were there that's why they replaced them because you know they had to cut the beams anyway to get the roof off and then they came along and took all of the side pieces off individually and took those so we were actually left with the vertical beams and actually one of the guys that we have help us with jobs around here he took them so those were used as well a couple days later on may 15th erin and i went down to treasure valley community college which is our local community college we both took classes there actually and we planted a bunch of stuff it was so fun um it was definitely a learning year we're going to be doing it again this next year and i'm excited for it um but we just decked out some of their flower beds so we did their two entry beds so like where they've got big signs and then we did a bed lining their greenhouse we did areas around their fountain and oh my word most everything turned out beautiful we did a bunch of pots too so there are pots everywhere along around the campus and we planted a bunch of those up but i used a lot of beautiful stuff in there purple fountain grass incredible sunflowers plain the blue salvia supertuni vista bubble gum some apple mia the sweetheart lime what else did i use the only thing i didn't love in the displays was the gomphrena the truffle of pink gomphrena because i think it was getting a little bit too much water to keep everything else happy gomphrena wants to be a little bit more on the dry side so that was user error it wasn't the plant's fault it was my fault but those are the sorts of things that you learn and can adjust it still looked nice it just looked a little bit more pale than it usually does i also used a lot of toucan cannas and especially the interior around the fountain it just a superchina mini vista indigo a lot of that vertigo penicidum it was just a beautiful amount of color and they seemed to really enjoy it so we went back several times i think several times maybe a couple times through the season just to give you updates on how things were growing may 24th was the gazebo pad removal so after everything was gone the top of the gazebo the vertical beams we had to get that concrete pad torn out so chad had to bring i mean he brought jackhammers and then he ended up going to get this massive iron ball that he'd pick up and drop our poor neighbors thankfully they got it done pretty quickly but like to break that sort of thing up you know how do you do that but it's amazing that chad can come in with his equipment you know chad and his team they've done a lot of the earth removal and things around here well all of the earth removal and things and they make it look like it's our tree surface is the same way natural tree they come in and it looks like you never had a tree there like there's no trace of anything and they've not broken a single leaf of anything else around them and chad's the same way it comes in and takes this concrete pad out and like minimal like damage to anywhere around they're just so good at what they do we're so lucky to have people like that around us that can help us out um but yeah it was really fun to see that gone because i felt like okay now we have a blank slate and now we can start with the harley and then moving into july which is kind of like dog days of summer it's usually really really hot um and the smoke starts to roll in usually about then from fires you know surrounding us it kind of like wants to come into the valley and kind of stick around for a little while but there was some exciting stuff so the first of july the hartley arrived they send their own team they send two guys here so they fly them in and the guys receive the truck they unload it themselves they account for everything that's in that truck and then they fly home like basically the same day so it hartley takes care of everything like no part of it was ever really on my shoulders um so that was really interesting to see and just to see like the little finials i could see that through the packaging i cannot believe that i have a hartley sitting in my driveway right now like this is not real it was it was pretty crazy and then later that month on july 23rd the hartley was constructed and garden-wise that was peak that was the highlight of the year was to see parts of that hartley like constructed to see the doorway constructed on the grass and then to see them put it up on the oh the structure it was just it was just amazing um of course prior to that there were several things that had to happen so you know the gazebo pad had been removed it was a raw piece of ground they had to dig out so chad dug out the footers and then they had to put in uh forms and rebar there's twice as much rebar and thicker rebar than is what's required here but that's what like the hartley engineers i mean it was it's an intense intense building and then on august 12th and this doesn't seem like a super pivotal moment but it kind of is but i waited the new lawn up front and it was very satisfying to do that because i was mostly weeding puncture vines which one puncture vine can be this big so you've got your roots in the center and they usually pull out fairly easily and then all the like the whole weed draws together and you've got all of a sudden the super clean area that's huge um so it's a satisfying thing to do and it was taking care of a noxious weed problem but even though the lawn looked pretty poor at this point you could see that there was lawn there like grass was starting to come up it was very patchy um very like you could still see the white soil through it pretty pretty good but you could see that there was progress happening and i think we would have been able to manage the weeds had we just left them his grasses grass is pretty good at smothering things out but puncture vines are the worst and they had already set their seed and so if for no other reason than just to get the seed up so that we're not getting them all over in our feet and dragging them all around our garden i think that that was a good thing and i think we eradicated a huge maybe potential problem in the future because when we pulled up those plants we were pulling all the seeds with them they were still holding on right toward the very end when we got to the very end of that lawn because it took us a while some of the seeds were starting to fall off i think most of them won't survive because they won't survive in the amount of water that the lawn needs to survive they like more dry conditions i still think we avoided a huge problem and it looked a lot better getting it weeded on september 7th i edged the new flower beds up in that same lawn area and you can see at that point how much better the lawn was looking it did it took a while it's actually looking really good right now i mean you can definitely see areas where it's come compacted like i talked about earlier and there's lots of things that we need to work on amendments that we'll be adding throughout the years but we got such a good start on it that i'm really encouraged and with the new flower beds you can kind of see the like one side is huge the side where the blue spruce was that's a huge big area and we can really do some fun stuff in there kind of along the same vein on september 17th i started edging the new walkways out on the new property i started with the one that leads up to the flower garden so it kind of like closer to the house and it's just kind of a swoop of a walkway but it really helped define that area it was so satisfying edging grass is a lot of physical work but oh my word when you can take a space like that and i used a 15 foot pipe that was very helpful that's kind of what we used to help us mark off the whole pathway when we very first were putting flags out where we needed sprinklers but i took that same pipe and i kind of took it along with me as i was cutting so i could make sure to maintain that 15 foot width and i think you know things might shift a little bit but we've got it pretty good like it's and it's filled in even more since i started doing that so i did that one side and then a few weeks later i did the big loop and then actually paul and another guy who came in briefly to help us with some projects he helped dig dahlias and do some christmas lights and also help edge the grass um he helped so he and paul came behind me i cut all the grass and then they helped scrape up all the excess around the outside and so that one went way faster than the first one because i did the whole first one all by myself on october 1st we started our greenhouse project so with our cold frame that's just right alongside our barn we've been using it as just a cold frame for the last five years but jenny and jerry from creekside nursery north carolina they came over to help us retrofit our greenhouse so that we can heat it and actually use it for seed production and to do some other fun things with so now our greenhouse has a double layer of plastic we put new plastic on the whole thing and it has side curtains that are thermostat controlled so they certain temperatures they'll raise on their own and they'll lower on their own which is awesome we had gas trenched over here to the barn and then trenched over underneath the greenhouse and a heater put up in there so we haven't utilized the heat yet it's all running we had it running for like a week just to see how it would do it's all working great we have shut the heat off though because we're expecting negative four temperatures this next weekend and i needed to protect some plants that can't be really necessarily in heat but they need to be protected from negative temperatures so right now we're using it as a cold frame but then soon i don't think that's supposed to last long the temperatures are going right back up into the high 20s hopefully we'll be able to kick those plants out and then heat that up and start some seeds here this next month it'll be a whole new world for me too because i'm not used to growing things on out in a greenhouse i'm used to using it for already grown on plants just housing them until i'm ready to use them so i expect some success and some failure um it'll just be a really fun thing so i do have tomatoes peppers cucumber cucumber started in here right now and those things i intend on potting up and putting out there once i can heat it and just trying to see what happens like maybe we can get some early production out of those plants that would be amazing and then later that month on october the 27th the walls on the cut flower shed went up we just call it the cut flower shed because it's out by our flower garden it's it's a shed that we'll be using for all kinds of different things to house some tools some things that we use most often i'll have all my flower buckets out there a lot of my vases i'll have a work table in there we'll probably film some projects in there the east and west side walls are basically all windows and so is the south side there's windows and then glass door so it'll be really bright and light in there and it's just a really fun structure to see because now it does have a roof it has a roof on it the door hasn't been installed yet but it is here we're kind of waiting we're waiting at this point it's you know wrapped in that paper the siding that i chose is all wood and so we need to make sure that i can line up the painting crew right after the wood siding goes up so that the wood siding is not exposed to all of our wintertime moisture and all of that we don't want any unnecessary damage going on so it'll probably remain the way it is until spring i'm guessing but i'm hoping to have a functioning shed this next year i didn't even expect that to even like get remotely close to starting that and it just happened to work out and so you know i'm just thrilled just to see it look like it is looking right now and i even decked it out for christmas put reeds on the windows put little pots with trees out there and that was that was really fun and then after that point so the end of october there wasn't any huge projects that were at least visible anyway i mean we planted a lot of bulbs our my order from color blends this year was like twelve thousand five hundred and fifty bulbs uh ninety four hundred of which went in the orchard of course you can't see what they look like until they're blooming in the spring but that was a huge project and then we had 3 100 more bulbs is that my does that add up my math makes sense um anyway 3 000 ish but more bulbs to plant out daffodils tulips and snowflakes so those are mostly planted out in the south garden so that should be a pretty color show and then of course a bunch of christmas lights and other projects here and there you know i've decorated our mantel and showed you that we've done some cooking and just some other fun kind of more cozy projects house plants and things like that so yeah it's been a really crazy year and i just thought it would be fun to reflect on everything because i think that's a good thing to do to remember you know where we started at the beginning of the year and i mean we even had a baby this year she's not even a year old and we still got that much stuff done outside uh it's just amazing and things that i never even dreamed that we would be attempting to begin this year were started like the cut flower shed i didn't even know the orchard would happen like all of that stuff the raspberry beds that was a bonus all of it's a bonus it's just so amazing to me and i just when i look back at it it just reminds me oh of all of it like it all comes flooding back and just all of the excitement and every time we got you know to check something off the list and see the the new piece of property come kind of come together and show a little bit of what the vision is of it but i just feel so incredibly thankful for all the things that we're able to do definitely blessed in um all the people we have around us that's the other thing we have an amazing crew of people um that help us you know paul out here we have we've had temporary help like jordan come in this fall and help us with some big things we've just had some really incredible people around us because that's the only way you know that we would be able to get that much done in one year and you guys you know watching our videos and supporting us and encouraging us through the whole thing and just being excited about it you know so many of you guys i feed off of your excitement when you comment and say how excited you are to see the flower shed go in or how excited you are to see the dahlias looking the way they are that like invigorates me so i do appreciate all the comments all of the support all of you guys watching our videos it's just been amazing thank you so much i hope you all had a wonderful year as well and here's to 2022 i don't know what it's gonna bring but i think it's gonna be great thank you guys so much for watching this video and we will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Garden Answer

Views: 229,898

Keywords: Garden, Answer, Laura, Flower, gardening, gardener, beautiful, succulents, diy, grow, green, Proven, Winners, Fall, Winter, summer, spring, plant, planting, growing, plants, succulent, shrubs, shrub, bush, soil, dirt, earth

Id: szg_EcXDLws

Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 31 2021