Don’t think I did too bad with a dead backyard and a $200 budget.

I’m In zone 10B in Southern California just outside of Los Angeles. The only thing that I’ve grown in my backyard in 20 years was cheese weed and dandelions along with one of the saddest Myers lemon trees in existence.

Last fall, I decided I wanted to start to reclaim some of it so I started by turning over a few patches of dead soil and saving all of the leaves from the giant tree in my front yard. I let them rot down over the winter and in the spring I mixed in a bunch of compost and covered everything with a few inches of wood chips.

I’ve done everything from seed (other than the two trees in my strawberries) and so far I have six varieties of tomatoes, two zucchini, three kinds of squash, pumpkins, watermelons, corn, eggplant, tomatillos, six different kinds of peppers, strawberries, a fig tree, an apricot tree, pretty much every kind of herb that I can grow as well as sunflowers, okra, and a bunch of other things like salvia, lavender. Amaranth and a bunch of other flowers and perennials that didn’t takeoff quite as much as everything else.

With everything I’ve learned these past couple months I’m excited for next year when I double the space that I’m growing in this year.