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!
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 