Some welcomed guests in the yard. Robins have arrived.

I witnessed these gals/guys on my bird bath this weekend. At one time, there were at least six drinking and bathing.

Blogging in the Mile High City

Welcome to my new garden blog. I have been gardening on and off for the past five years and have decided to start sharing my progress, failures and the benefits for going green.

I guess one of my favorite things about gardening is watching something go from nothing to a beautiful lush, vibrant plant. There's nothing I like more than stirring the compost - turning it into rich soil - planting a shrub and seeing it mature and grow year-to-year. The other thing that I really love is watering.

I know this sounds very strange but I really do like watering. It's therapeutic.

I grew up on a homestead where my father planted and maintained eight raised-bed gardens. He would stand and water those beds by hand, each and every night, sipping on a watered-down Grand Canadian on the rocks.

It was such an amazing garden that we would have people driving by at 60 miles per hour only to hear them stop, put the car in reverse, and drive into our driveway just to see the jungle of produce.

While in high school my father maintained a three bin compost pile built from pallets. We filled that thing full of everything organically imaginable. We're talking fish from a fish kill at a local lake. My friends and I ended up carrying five or six garbage bags full of stinky fish out of the lake bed and into the back of my dad's yellow Toyota pickup.  We collected cow patties from the 40 acre field surrounding our house. All the kitchen scraps and egg shells, coffee grounds, ashes from the wood stove, and I hesitate even say but probably a dead chicken or too, hee hee.

This taught me a lot about using nature and living off of what we already use. My dad built a greenhouse and we heated our house. When it was 30 below zero out in the plains it was 95° inside - all free resources from the sun. 

So I'm applying what I know and what I've learned from my father growing up to my own urban homestead in my backyard. We have a two-bin compost pile and, I've planted 3 square-foot raised garden bins, numerous shrubs and many bird friendly trees, two bird feeders and bird houses.

So welcome to my first new blog post and I hope you will stick around for my journey. Thank you.