Continuing on with the timeline of changes to the yard, we are going to take a look at the left side of the yard.

2015 – We will start here as 2013 & 2014 were the same for both sides of the yard. In 2015 we put in our first batch of tomatoes, using the traditional wire cages. We knew very little and let the tomatoes go wild, resulting in a good yield, but very few that actually ripened. We also battled our first horn worm (luckily only ever had the one), and the tomato plants grew so large that they bent the wire cages.

2016 – The tomato towers were built and would be used for the next 5 years, growing beautiful tomatoes. The 3-level strawberry tower was also added to the base of the left side slope, providing us with delicious berries for the next 5 years.

2017 – Same agenda for the left slope. The tomato towers once again helped our large tomato plants grow and produce. The strawberry tower was overflowing with berries all summer. Our neighbour gave us a Cherry tree, so we built a small rock garden bed next to the strawberry tower, plunked the tree in and added an artistic trellis and blackberry plant.

2018 – The left slope continued to grow tomatoes. There was some irrigation work that had to be done to the cedars that sit atop the left side hill. Thanks to Ellie’s perimeter checks, she had pushed the gravel from behind the shop onto the irrigation heads, burying them. The trees began to die due to lack of water. We decided to run the irrigation in the tree and hang it downward to avoid the issue of them potentially getting buried again in the future.

2019 – Status quo for the left side. Though we did have to build some netting around the strawberries as the magpies had found them and were not interested in leaving us any. Ellie & Basil also took their magpie evictions seriously and did their bit to make sure those birds stayed away.

2020 – The big change for the left side of the yard was the new fence. The neighbour wanted to change out our old short one. It was shocking to see the difference and realize how little privacy we had with the old fence.

2021 – This year we had hoped to complete the walls on the left side, however due to injuries and ridiculous weather, we weren’t able to complete the walls. We will get it finished in the spring of 2022, guaranteed! Our plan is to have them done early enough in the spring to be able to do some late spring planting in the new beds. We will see though.