Suburban Gardens

Cocoa bean mulch, oh how I love thee.  Let me count the ways:

- You are so full of chocolately goodness.  I love how you smell when I water the garden.
- Next spring, Dan can just till you right back into the soil, and you will loosen it nicely.
- O course you're mulch, so you keep down the weeds and keep in the moisture.
- You make my gardens look oh so pretty.
- You're not toxic (except to dogs, but I don't have one) or full of dyes or weird stuff.  Apparently it is even organic.  See link above.

Since we moved into our new house just over a year ago, we decided to turn the two backyard flower beds into a pepper garden and a tomato garden.  But of course, since we live in Suburbia and have about a thousand neighbors, these little side gardens cannot just be functional.  They must look pretty too.  To accomplish this, I use cocoa bean mulch.  I seriously love this stuff.  I just finished my tomato and pepper gardens tonight.

Pepper garden as seen from the deck.  We grow a mix of sweet and hot peppers.  I pickle the hot peppers and we eat all the sweet ones fresh.  One of my favorites is a sweet Italian heirloom pepper called "Corno di Toro."  I discovered this variety last year.  The multi-colored (red, orange, yellow, green) peppers are huge and so sweet!  I also snuck a tarragon plant into the middle this year.

The tomato garden curves around the posts of our deck.  The tomatoes are backed by a few miscellaneous perennial flowers, as well as a beautiful sage plant (show in the front left of the picture below).

I don't grow enough tomatoes to can, but I make really delicious "sun-dried" tomatoes in my mom's dehydrator.

Look for a post later about the "big" garden.  It doesn't look so pretty yet.  Plus I still need to plant red pototoes, pumpkins and watermelon.