It has been a busy summer and even though fall has arrived, things are not slowing down! We have picked a freezer full of vegetables and I have canned more tomatoes than I can count! Here are some photos of the garden to give you an idea of what we have been up to. Above is a lousy photo of one of our ginger lilies in bloom-they are so fragrant!
Back in May, I brought home 7 tire planters from the Urban Gardening Festival. This one is full of shade loving plants and they have really filled in, now I need to figure out how to keep it alive over the winter-these plants are not cold hardy!
The other 6 tires look like this and I just replanted them with fall flowers-now they need to fill in. The strawberries have spread like crazy and we are hoping for fruit by the bowl next year. The strawberries have also helped the rhubarb crowns get established and we were able to harvest from each plant.
Gate greeters-love the little faces that greet me as I enter the garden.
The chair planters I made this spring have filled in.
How can you not love sedum? These plants are so hardy and can survive the neglect they sometimes get in this busy garden.
Love the colors and textures they add too and bees love the blossoms.
All of this heat has been just what the peppers needed and they are coming in by the bowl.
Poblanos
Sweet banana
Roselle Hibiscus is one of my favorite plants in the garden. This year I am experimenting with jam. The first batch is in jars but I see room for improvement and will be making more.
Someone asked me why I planted flowers in the garden. The short answer, I like them! But more importantly, so do pollinators and butterflies. This little skipper is drinking from a noodle bean flower.
New to us this year is Cardinal Basil. Those flower heads can get as big as a softball and the leaves are huge as well. The flavor is an intense, classic sweet basil flavor and it has made its way into a lot of tomato sauce this summer!
The change of seasons means a change of plants. Extra Dwarf Pak Choy is actually ready to harvest and we have picked some already.
The last of the canning tomatoes-finally done with it for the year!
Where ever I go in the garden, they watch us work
Lady Bird, our only Americauna hen is a little shy in comparison to the others
The watermelon jungle. First one we picked wasn’t ready and the chickens ended up with a nice treat. This one looks ready to go.
Glass chicken.
The bottle tree.
The flower tower
Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are one of the best heirloom beans. We let a bunch go to seed so we will have plants next year. We can also dry out the seeds and cook them like other dried beans.
Finding an egg in the box is something that never gets old.
We harvested the sweet potatoes and pulled up about 40 pounds from the six plants in the bed. So, there you have it, what we have been up to the last couple of months. Come back and visit soon!
There are so many things to see in the garden, too many to share. This is a glimpse of what is going on now. Enjoy the view!
This update is a little late but if you are wondering how the garden is coming along, here it is! When we finally had our hard frost a few weeks ago, I went out and spent the day cleaning and harvesting what I could.
In my effort to add visual interest, I have added a bottle tree and the white metal baskets are a project in the works.
Our hens have really helped us improve the soil and control insects. These are two of our young hens; a Black Australorp and an Americauna, who is also our only green egg layer.
She really is a sweet bird but she is also a bit shy and the other hens tend to bully her a bit.
These are a couple of the old girls. We brought our Golden Laced Wyandottes with us when we moved here from Virginia. They aren’t laying much anymore now that they are over 2 years old but they still help out by providing us with manure and by eating insects.
The iridescent feathers on the Australorps are beautiful when the sun hits them. The hens wander the outside of the garden in their tunnels and they are safe from hawks and our plants are safe from the hens!
This pretty lady, an 
Because I was curious, I looked up information about her and discovered that this little brown ball is actually an egg sac. Each one can contain about a thousand live babies who will over winter in the sac. As I cleaned up the bed of flowers where she was living, I discovered three of these egg sacs! In the hope of having another spider or two next year, I carefully moved the sacs and placed them in the beds with our fig trees.
Early in the spring, I planted a number of perennial flowers and herbs around the garden. At that time, I also planted an artichoke. It has gotten large and if it survives the winter, I am hoping for chokes!
Cabbage heads are looking good.
We harvested most of the broccoli for Thanksgiving dinner and froze what we did not cook. Because we only cut the top heads off, we left the plants in the ground so that they would produce side shoots of smaller heads. If all goes according to the plan, we will be picking broccoli through the winter.
When we were in Virginia, I planted Tokyo market turnips for the first time. They are smaller than the typical turnips found in grocery stores. At last check, they were nearing maturity and I am looking forward to roasting a few!
Cardoon looks a lot like an artichoke. The difference, chokes or the flower, are the only edible part of an artichoke while both the flower and the stalk are edible on a cardoon. Actually, the stalk is more commonly consumed and it requires a long simmer to soften the extremely tough fibers.
The stalks look like celery on steroids and they are just as tough as you would imagine. And then there are the spines; they are every bit as sharp as they look!
Handle the stalks with care and be sure to cut them off before you try to cut and cook the stalks.
All around the garden are little pops of color in the form of violas, one of my favorite plants.
Love this color combination.
Part of the clean up meant gathering tomatoes, both ripe and green. If you are considering planting tomatoes, give these little yellow gems a try. They are called Barry’s Crazy Cherry and they can be found in the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog.
Late in spring, we put a watermelon plant into the garden. Hoping for a few melons to share with the hens, we were disappointed by how slowly the plants grew. This was the largest of three melons. The first one that we cut into was white inside, it became some really nice pickles. The other two are still waiting to be cut and we are hoping for better luck!
We have been hard at work building our new garden. Actually, we have been engaged in a war with bermuda grass and right now, we are barely hanging on to the lead in this battle! Despite using lots of cardboard and wood chips, this stuff finds a way to break out and sprout up everywhere. Luckily, there is no shortage of cardboard or wood chips as well as my stubborn determination!
In late winter, I started a few beds by broadcasting a bunch of seeds over them. In this bed, the Chinese Cabbages are doing really well and we should be harvesting them soon!
These Tokyo Market turnips are a favorite of ours and we are harvesting them about once a week. They are wonderful when roasted and the greens are tender enough that you just have to saute them, no boiling necessary!
In a nearby bed, I threw in lettuce seeds, obviously too many but, we have had tons of lettuce to eat and to share.
We purchased about a dozen broccoli plants and we have been eating it roasted and in salads. Did you know that you can harvest those large leaves and eat them too? We have done this on many occasions making the individual plants twice as productive. Use the heads and some of the stems raw in salads and slaws or roast the florets with a little oil and your favorite spice blend. The leaves should be blanched first to soften them, then saute them with a little garlic, you won’t regret it.
Who doesn’t love surprises? Especially if it is a raspberry bush-we have found two so far!
Of course, we learned of the muscadines from a neighbor and earlier this spring, we gave them a hard pruning to alleviate some of the weight and shading on the vines. New vines have erupted and we are starting to see the promise of fruits.
Beyond the garden is an area where I am hoping to develop a meadow for bees and butterflies. Right now, it is a tangle of weeds and in the middle, is what looks like a dandelion on steroids. Goatsbeard, 
It was disappointing to learn that it is an introduced species and not considered a beneficial addition to the landscape. But that seed head!
Then there is this guy, Hunky Dory the Americauna rooster we got in the latest brood. He is a handsome fellow but a noisy one as well. We gave him that name because he will crow to let us know that something is not up to his standards. Not enough pellets; crow. No water; crow. Roosting bar fell down; crow. Clock strikes 3am; crow…
Not only is it against the law, we do not want fertilized eggs or more chickens so the handsome fellow will be rehomed as soon as we can find a suitable situation.
About a month ago, our chickens came home from their temporary location. We decided to put the coop within the garden so that they can help us with insect control and composting and more importantly, to keep the dog away from their droppings-we won’t discuss her disgusting taste in snacks…
The garden itself is approximately 38 feet wide by 94 feet long, which makes it about 3500 square feet. That gave us plenty of room for the coop and pen as well as the tunnels. The first thing I did out there was dedicate an area for composting and it is just behind the wheel barrow.
It took us an entire weekend to paint the PVC, build the hoop frame and cover it with the poultry netting. Knowing that we can leave them outside during the day without worrying about hawks. The large pen has another purpose; we will store leaves in there and the chickens will help us compost them. They constantly dig in the leaves which helps break them up and because the leave droppings as they go, the nitrogen in them will also help with the composting process. It takes at least six months to break them down so we will have to be patient.
The hoops are attached to the coop so that we can leave their door open to give them access to the pen.
If the chickens are going to help with insect control in the garden, they need to be able to walk through it but unfortunately, they could run into hawks and more importantly, they would make a mess of the beds. The solution; tunnels. We built them in Williamsburg so that they would have more space to roam and when we moved, we took them apart and moved them with us.
Starting at the far end of the pen, we are running the tunnels down the fence line and around the exterior edge of the garden. We may still let them out into the garden occasionally but not with out supervision.
We attached the fence hoops to the wire fencing with cable ties.
To keep them in place on the ground, we used lawn staples.
will garden for cake 