Gardening on a city lot

We moved from a half acre lot to less than a 1/3 acre lot in the city. It is definitely easier to maintain here but it has its downfalls. There is not much all day sun. We have a massive pecan in our backyard along with the neighbor’s massive pecan. One whole side of our yard is shaded most of the year.

Even when it’s not, you have to deal with seedlings popping up and small branches dropping on your plants. You are seeing my son’s batting cage above, which is being taken down and sold. I have plans of putting some fruit trees back there.

The branches that get dropped everywhere! We don’t use roundup or amdro in our backyard, but it also means that our neighbors might. We are trying to encourage bees and butterflies but they maybe killing them. My butterfly bush is loaded with honey bees and butterflies in the spring but the bees disappeared in the summer. We have aerial spraying for mosquitos here. In the fall they were so bad that even I was welcoming the spray. I like where we live. It has an in ground sprinkler system which is really handy but forces you to be creative when building raised beds. We accidently put one too close to one of our beds and when it raised up it blasted the garden. How do you deal with gardening in the city?