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.
This part of the garden does not get much direct sunlight and once the crape myrtle, which is not in the photo, leafs out completely, it gets little filtered light as well. Last spring I spent a week amending the soil and adding shade tolerant perennials to the bed. This year, nearly all of them came back except for a bleeding heart plant and they have truly filled the space.
The iris actually gets enough light because it blooms before the crape myrtle creates shade. Also in bloom are azaleas, dianthus and phlox.
Remind me to tell you the story of the gnome sometime… He is watching over the sunny part of the garden.
Love the little blossoms on the strawberry begonia.
While I have put a lot of work into the perennial beds near the front door of the house, none of that compares to the amount of work the vegetable garden has taken. We began in late fall of 2014 by composting the leaves that fell from our trees with grass clippings from the lawn and bags of coffee grounds from Starbucks. In spring of 2015, I topped each of the beds with that compost and placed 45 bales of straw on the beds in the garden. Throughout the year, I attempted to grow vegetables in the bales with out a ton of success. In early winter, when the bales began to tip like drunkards, I broke them down and scattered the straw on top of the compost along with more coffee, ground egg shells, compost (that includes litter from our hens) and a topping of purchased garden soil.
Peas were slow to get going but have finally come on board. Gotta love the tendrils and the way they tie themselves into knots.
Everybody loves surprise potatoes! Must have missed one when I harvested them last fall. not sure what it is but I am thinking it is most likely a yukon gold but the alternative is red norland; either way works for me!
A lot of firsts this year. Ailsa Craig onions along with some radishes from an 8 year old package of seeds I found lurking in the box! We have lots of mushrooms coming up in the beds. Did you know that is a good thing? There is a relationship between plants and mushrooms and when some combinations are grown together, you can actually improve your yields-this pairing was random and not of my doing but my fingers are crossed that it helps. Want to know more about it, pick up a copy of 
Chinese cabbage is doing so well-and I grew this from seeds!
The way chard glows when backlit never gets old.
These rutabegas are taking off in the garden. If you grow them, be sure to eat the greens too! Cook them as you would collards and the plant will be doing double duty.
Another of the firsts in our garden, salsify. Have no idea if we will enjoy it but I saw some plants in Colonial Williamsburg in the garden the the local master gardeners maintain and decided it was pretty and it needed to live in my garden too!
Speaking of pretty, these radicchio starts have been stealing the show for a while now. We pull a few leaves off from the bottom and are letting the heads fill out.
More starts, celery is taking its time.
will garden for cake 