"Harvest" Season and The Death of Our Yard

I know that you guys have been dying to know how our garden ended up this year.

Well....our garden has just been dying...so...yeah.

This year I really wanted to have an awesome garden.  Last year we spent most of the growing season working on changing up our backyard so we ended up with the raspberries and a couple hand fulls of cherry tomatoes.

Well, for 2012, we got........are you ready for this?

Raspberries, zucchini, and parsley.

End of list.

Oh...and I guess we ended up with two mandarin oranges.

Remember all that stuff that I planted at the end of February?

Yeah....it died.  Pretty much all of it.

Tomatoes burnt up in the intense sun we got this summer.

Pole beans were doing AMAZING until I started over watering them in an attempt to help them grow faster/better/stronger.  They molded from the inside out.  I didn't even know that that was a thing.

Sunflowers burnt up in the sun.

Onions......also....burnt up in the sun.

Also, our mint and chives that we had kept through the winter of 2011-2012.....you guess it....burnt up in the sun.   And people said I couldn't kill mint.  Just watch me.  I even tried to shade it under the raspberry bush.

The Oregano?  I don't even know.  All of these tiny little sprouts came up and were growing, so I thinned them out....and all the ones I left in promptly died.

In fairness....

The Zucchini died too...and I had to replant it and that is what we finally got zucchini off of at the end of the year.

As you might recall, later I bought a basil plant at the store.

Yeah....that got moldy and died.  Totally died.

Think we bought some tomato plants at the store and they also straight up burned up in the heat of the sun.

And how did our second year go with the blue berry bushes?  Did they finally produce fruit?

I found one flower early on in the growing season.

A couple weeks later, I found a shriveled and burnt up berry clinging to the branches of our scorched blueberry bush.  Excellent.

I would say, for the amount of work we put into the garden....it was a total bust.

We got about 3 zucchini from the plant in September/October.

We got tons of parsley that I didn't really use for anything...because I don't need THAT much parsley.

But the raspberries that require no real attention from me, bore fruit twice this year.  That was a plus.

What is that thin vine all on the ground around the zucchini plant?

I'm glad you asked.

That is bind weed.  Also called wild Morning Glory. We have it all over our flower beds.

It also moved into the yard.

It moved into the yard and covered up the grass so that it couldn't get any sun.  They it took all the nutrients from the ground and MURDERED our  backyard.

By the time Aaron poisoned the Morning Glory, it had killed all of our grass.  Aaron raked all the dead stuff out and so now we are left with bare dirt and some grass and weed clinging to the ground barely by the roots.

Not only was our garden this year a bust....but our whole yard also died in the process.