The Hydra Place

The backyard of this house is sizable but hadn't really been utilized much. Before I moved, I did a bit of gardening and could grow a few things. I figured I'd take a crack at breaking up some dirt and do a test run this year. There's still a lot of trees around that can block the sun so I made due the best I could.

Recently I realized that squash is actually decent as filler food and braindead to sear in a cast iron with just a dab of oil and salt. Cooking and recipe thread coming eventually. So I nabbed some seeds at a discount shop for zucchini and summer squash. Though I didn't plant any of the latter. To go with them was a number of green beans (often dumps nitrogen into the soil) and cayenne peppers just to see if I could grow something hot and spicy in this environment.
I just had a tiny spade, so this was a bit slow. I just picked a spot near mid-day sun and started digging strips. The soil's a bit gritty and rain falls often here, so it's a bit tough. Figured I'd make strips so squash that grows can be placed somewhere easily and not start crushing other plants.
There's also a tree stump that's been around for I have no idea how long. There'd been a hole in it that caught rain water a lot. So I took some dirt, filled it, and put some more seeds in. I have no idea if this will bear fruit, or veggies, but it would be funny. Maybe it'll just rot. No idea. This feels fun for Crop and Claw whimsy, though.
As I often lament, we get tons of leaves falling from trees above in the autumn, so we burn a lot. But the pile just sits there until next year. So while we had a bag of dirt, I figured all those burned arbora corpses would be nutritious and used a bit of that instead, mixed in with the bagged fertilizer. There's still quite a lot left too. God I hate leaves in autumn.

Now I can at least track how things grow by dumping them here, since I'm too lazy otherwise.

I was just thinking about how all the burnt leaves would make good fertilizer as I was reading and glad to see that came up for y'all too!

Actually had a little garden as a kid, but nothing quite this big...!
Do remember and recommend some wooden/metal stakes depending to help some plants grow!
As well as some simple chicken wire to stop a few animals from getting in there too!

It seems the day-or-two watering in this climate does okay. The green beats are staring to pop out.
I'm not sure if the squash is catching on though, or if any of these are. They all line up with the various beans I planted roughly. So either the squash is more picky, takes longer to germinate and pop up, or I misidentify. Plants are weird.