Around the Garden

Hello there, my friends, I thought I would take you on a little tour of the garden today, so grab a cup of tea and join me. Let's start in the front garden, shall we?

This bed was one of our winter garden spaces. We planted it in late March with a variety of salad greens, spinach, kale, marigolds and zinnias. We are eating it up as fast as we can, as it will soon be seeded with a cover crop to get it ready for our fall/winter garden season.

Here we have a bush beans, carrots, dill, marigolds, calendula, kale, Swiss chard, pole beans, and sunflowers.

And in this bed, tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, sage, basil, zinnias, marigolds, and cosmos. Tucked in the back corner of the garden, there is another little bed that you can see in this photo. It was a last minute addition after we finished all the fencing, and it was seeded with sunflowers, zinnias, and calendula. I have high hopes for that little corner, it should be a burst of colour in another month.

The cold frame was planted in late March with salad greens, beets, kale, spinach, and Swiss chard. Those beets are just about ready to harvest, and I am pretty excited about that. We will soon harvest everything from the cold frame as well so we can prep the soil for our fall/winter garden.

We have two rather long raised beds. This one is filled with bush beans, runner beans, snow peas, sweet William, cucumbers, sunflowers, calendula, and thyme.

And the other long raised bed is filled with soon to be harvested garlic! There was a bit of space at the end of the bed, so I threw in a few tomato plants and marigolds.

As we leave the front garden, a large archway to try our hand at growing pumpkins, squash, zucchini and cucumber up. At this moment I am thinking with all the rain we have had recently they are a little water logged. Yellowing leaves with no sign of bugs has me thinking this. So I will let them dry out a bit, and then add some fertilizer to give them a little boost. Fingers crossed I am right.

On to the garden I refer to as the chicken run garden, due to it's location in front of the chicken run.

The first raised bed is filled with asparagus. I planted these earlier this season. They are two year old crowns, so if all goes well, we should be able to harvest next spring, although I might leave them one more year before harvesting. We will make that decision next spring.

And here we have our berries. Right in front of the chicken run are late season raspberries. And the bed in front of that has a row of first year raspberries, and a row of first year blueberries. There is space for another row of blueberries that I will plant next spring. I have also left space in this garden area for another bed of strawberries, to be planted next spring.

And around the corner we head into the back garden.

A raised bed filled with a variety of food, kale, beets, Swiss chard, salad greens and calendula.

First season strawberries!

Another mix and match raised bed with tomatoes, carrots, bush beans, runner beans, borage, chives, parsley and marigolds.

The final raised bed in the back garden with kale, Swiss chard, beets, mustard greens and calendula.

In the center of the back garden, a small herb garden is filled with catnip, rosemary, all-heal, bee balm, yarrow, St. John's wort, lavender, lemon balm and echinacea.

Two smaller raised beds at the front of the back garden, meant to contain easy to take over herbs...nettles and peppermint.

And the final raised bed, in front of the play structure. Growing here are alpine strawberries, a few tomatoes, sunflowers and blackberries.

Thanks for joining me on that little tour, I hope you enjoyed it. As you can see beets are almost ready to harvest, the snow peas keep rolling in, the green beans are starting to produce, and the greens continue to show up at pretty much every meal. And did you see those tomatoes? There are plenty of them starting to show up, and while it will be a little while before we harvest any, just seeing them makes me happy.

Before I sign off, a few harvests from the week:

A herbal harvest...calendula, chamomile, lavender, yarrow and St. John's wort. There are a variety of herbs planted in the back garden, but there are also a lot planted in the perennial beds around our property. Herbs, especially medicinal herbs, are something I can never have enough of.

And one of many before meal harvests..snow peas and Swiss chard. These were sauteed up, with onion, garlic and local asparagus, tossed with some pasta and topped with a lovely cashew cream sauce. It was delicious!

So tell me, how are things around your garden this week?