Date: October 2, 2023
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Top 10 best purchases for the beginning gardener

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A backyard with flowering trees and wooden planters.

For those who have been following along, we really grew our garden area to a large section of our yard. I have no doubt it will be a continuous project, but as we have gotten through year one, these items listed below were life savers. Many things were for convenience, but since we are both busy, this was super important.

  1. Raised Beds- We love our raised beds from Backyard Boxes in Denver, CO. They are great and if you want to read my full review, you can click here, or you can read my blog post on their site!
  2. Oto- I needed something that would help with the watering because let's be real. Life gets busy, and we all need support, Oto Lawn was that for me. I have loved it. Not having the expense of a full sprinkler system was big for me. Plus, we still plan to do quite a bit in our yard, and not knowing what will develop we wanted flexibility.
  3. Bean Pole- Since I love beans and peas, I wanted to grow several varieties. I also don't have a ton of space, so much of my garden had to be grown vertically. This bean pole allowed me to grow several plants in one section of the raised bed.
A raised garden bed with a water hose attached to it.

4. Fiskars basket- My garden area is further away from my house than I would like, but it is just the way it is. So this basket is a lifesaver for me. It carries so much produce, sometimes it amazes me. The other thing I like is I can also rinse off the fruit and veggies and let it strain outside versus making a big mess inside.

5. Fingertip snips- With a lot of what we grew, it was a pain to get my snips in harvest everything. I went to Amazon and found these fingertips

6. Plant Labels- These labels were perfect, and I love how they looked in the beds. They were easy to read and held up well. The only thing I would do differently would be to use a different marker than the one that came with them.

7. Lanterns- Oh my lanterns! I love these things, whether day or night, I love the aesthetic they bring to the garden. I might have to add more, lol.

8. Bee Box- I have always known how important bees are to our ecosystem, but in the last several years I have learned more about the decrease in the honey bee population. While I won't become a beekeeper anytime soon, I knew there were little things I could do that would not only help the bees but also my garden so we added a bee box to help those pollinators that would surely help me.

9. Trellis- If you read above, a lot of my garden needed to grow vertically. We decided to add four of these to the corner of the last bed. This would allow for more growing space in the garden.

10. Netting and PVC- Those dang pests got to so much of my garden we needed to add something and we needed to add it quickly. After a quick trip to Home Depot to pick up some PVC and netting we were in business. This was definitely, a "function of form," or aesthetic!

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