The garden is going well so far this year. Here are some pictures from the last week or two:
My foxglove have been spreading. And I have several white ones too. They are in front (as seen here) and along the moon garden portion of the old chicken shed.
Here is my greens bed – kale, Asian greens, chard, and collards. There is some spinach that is starting to bolt, and I’m growing some salsify as well.
My honeyberries are producing more. I need to put some kind of tarp down underneath. The berries are supposed to be ready when they just fall off the bushes (or you can shake them off). They are still a bit tart yet.
My strawberries are doing well. The mint is overtaking some of the bed, so later this summer I will be pulling everything out and replanting just the best strawberry plants.
My poppies all re-seeded, I can see them coming up everywhere. This bed will be full of them soon.
Here are even more poppies.
Here is half of my main garden. Things are growing well. I had a couple of zucchini plants not take, but I put like 12 in, so a few missing won’t matter so much.
Here is the other half of the main garden. I put sticks up around this bed to keep the deer from jumping in this year. A way to inexpensively make my fence taller.
We didn’t put the greenhouse fabric up this year, but I am still using it for planting. I put onions in, and some tomatoes. There are tons of ground cherries coming back from last year, and some wildflowers (daisies) and wild herbs (the giant Mullein on the left).
I did combined-beds (companion planting) this year. This bed is onions and Chinese cabbage. I have several beds with 2 things interplanted, to help save space, but also the plants benefit each other. There are also marigolds in this bed.
My nettles and Valerian came back in full force. We picked some nettles and froze them for eating when they were small. (They get too bitter once they get large). The Valerian flowers will smell really nice once they fully bloom.
I started some onion seeds this weekend. I’ve been planning out the garden, even though we have tons of snow on the ground (or maybe because of the snow). I like growing onions from seed – you get more choices than if you buy sets, and it’s cheaper. I like to start them usually at the beginning of February, but figured it was close enough.
I’m growing 5 types of onion this year:
The 5 onion varieties. I’ve grown three of these before, but the middle (Red of Florence) and right side (Yellow of Parma) are new kinds.
I like to start seeds in leftover mushroom containers (that the mushrooms come in at the store) – I poke holes in the bottom and put the mushroom containers on trays,or in a peat pellet tray so I can use a lid at first).
They say onion seeds are only good for a season but I have not found that to be the case. I have had good sprouting a few years later.
Here are the mushroom containers. I labeled seeds with the type. I can fit about 25 seeds in each of these.
The idea with these is that they’ll grow and be big enough to set out in April or May (depending on our weather). I have space for two beds of onions in my garden. I also read that you can put onions in around other things where you want to deter groundhogs and stuff and they will stay away.
As I do each spring, I came up with a whole seed starting schedule and made a spreadsheet to track when to start, where they are starting (inside or right in the ground), and how many I started. I am growing about 70 different varieties of things this year (3 kinds of tomatoes, 5 onions, etc), so it’s really helpful to make a chart. I cut it down to 70 – I have to restrain myself from growing ALL the types of seeds I have.
My seed starting table – it will get more full in April when I start some other things. I have grow lights and enough space for 3 or 4 trays of things.
It’s always exciting starting the gardening season, even if there is not a whole lot of work I can do yet.
We had a decent summer. I got really busy and have not updated here in awhile. My main garden is fenced, inside another fence (for our dogs). The deer have not really gotten in until this year – my dogs are getting older and I guess don’t really bark at the deer when they come in. The deer figured this out and essentially annihilated my main garden toward the end of the season. They ate all my tomatoes, and zucchini, and anything else they found out there. I did get a good harvest but I had to get what I could before they could eat it all. There are some things I didn’t even get to harvest because of the deer, including cauliflower and broccoli. Looking forward to next year, I’m going to have to make my garden fence taller, or something. I’ll figure that out. Luckily they didn’t get into our cottage garden (not sure why, but I’ll take it). For now, here are some cool pictures of the end of our gardening season 2021:
Here are some of our tomatoes and zucchini that we got, before the deer figured out they could get into the garden.
A bee on a Torch flower (Mexican sunflower)
A Monarch butterfly on the torch flowers. These flowers were wonderful and got about 6 feet tall and stayed blooming into October.
Some cute mushrooms growing in the old mulch of my cottage garden.
Our giant sunflowers this year. One got to about 12 feet tall.
A view of the sky between the tall sunflowers.
Here is an earlier picture of the torch flowers, when they were smaller.
My zinnias. These came up and bloomed after all my poppies were done. I also had some asters in this bed that bloomed into October.
Here are my “giant” pumpkins. They did get large (over 12″ across) but I believe they were stunted by the deer eating the plants and biting into these. You can see the damage they caused. I had to cage them in using old fence pieces so that I could keep the deer from demolishing them.
A foxglove bloom – my plant from last year either re-seeded or came back.
Some inky cap mushrooms growing in our driveway.
I put in sunchokes a few years ago (Jerusalem Artichokes) and they finally got a flower this year. We have yet to try to dig up tubers to eat them. I wanted the bed to get established, and this shows that they are finally getting there.
A closer photo of the one sunchoke flower.
Some cute mushrooms growing in the mulch by my Haskap berry plants. There were hundreds of these little guys. This pic does not do it justice. They are kind of hidden by the leaves as well.
Our garden is growing like crazy! Some vegetables are starting to ripen, and we’re eating lots of fresh stuff. We had a lot of lettuce, which I’ve been trying to pick before it bolts. We have had zucchinis galore! I’m growing three kinds this year, a regular green type, a yellow zucchini, and Zucchini Rampicante (a long type that curls). I’ve even just picked a couple of vine-ripened tomatoes! (Usually I’m waiting on some of those till later in the season). My garlic is almost ready, and we’re getting cabbage. Below you can see the photos of the garden:
Here is a picture down the path of our main garden.
Here you can see one of my giant pumpkin plants. The fruit you see is the one I chose to grow large. Any others I will pick off so that one can grow giant. I have three giant pumpkin plants this year.
My zucchini Rampicante plants against a trellis. These zucchini are so tasty that I am growing them again this year. They also turn into a winter squash if you leave them on the vine. (I usually don’t).
Here is my zucchini bush patch. I have 6 plants here, three green zucchini and three yellow. They are starting to over-run us. I am freezing zucchini like mad and we are eating a lot of it too.
My husband next to my Mongolian Giant sunflower plant, first in Mid July and then just this past weekend. He is 5’10” for reference. The plant is still growing – supposed to get up to 14 feet tall. In the second pic you can see one of the curly zucchini in the foreground.
Two of my cabbage that I picked. They formed some nice heads.
Here they are cleaned up. Not the hugest heads yet but I was super impressed.
My first ripe tomato! It was a 3-tomato mass that had grown together. I couldn’t even pick it without breaking the stem, the three tried to come apart.
My cabbages are doing fantastic. I have most of my brassicas together in the main garden this year, and I’ve been diligently spraying them with a “cabbage moth spray” I made to keep the stupid cabbage moths away. In my attempts at cabbage before I wasn’t even able to get heads, because the moth caterpillars ate them. So now, I make a spray by putting citrus (lemons or limes) and garlic into a jar, and fill it up with water. I let it soak for a week or so on the windowsill. I then strain it into a spray bottle (topping the bottle off with water if it’s not full). Then I spray every couple days or after rain. I make sure to spray a lot down into the middle where the heads are forming, I think the moths lay their eggs in there. They still do a little damage but they aren’t decimating the plants.
Here is my first sunflower to bloom in the main garden. It’s supposed to be more of a red variety.
Here is a torch sunflower (Mexican sunflower). These are about 5-6 feet tall now.
Here is a sunflower in my cottage garden. It’s not very big – the plant had broken, but then kept growing, so I think that is why it is stunted.
I have poppies galore! I have two spots in the cottage garden where they re-seeded from last year, and then one spot I planted a mix of them. I’m hoping they continue to re-seed. I didn’t have any luck with poppies until last year.
It’s the middle of winter here in the U.P. We have a bunch of snow, and more on the way today. Typically this time of year I am planning my garden, but I was way ahead of the game this time, and actually drew up plans in the late summer/early fall of last year. I was taking a look at what had worked, what I was tired of picking, what things we didn’t want to grow again this coming year. Because last year was such a mess trying to get seeds (with Covid lockdowns, and everyone wanting to grow a garden suddenly, seed companies were out of things – I had to order from 5 different places to get all the varieties I wanted), I just stocked up in the fall. So I really don’t need to get any new seeds this year. I might add a couple things as spring gets here. We’ll see.
Here you can see my snowy cottage garden as it looked this morning: (We are getting a bunch more snow as I type this).
I started my onions in January – they are doing pretty well. I am growing a large yellow variety called Ailsa Craig. I am on an ongoing quest to get really big onions. Last year I had some get to a decent size, like a small baseball size, but not the full size they could have gotten. We just recently used up the end of my saved onion stash, and we were down to a lot of tiny 1-inch onions at the end. I am hoping to increase the amount of large onions I grow, and hopefully get less smaller ones. Even if that means growing less onions, so be it. Besides those large onions, I’m also growing leeks, green onions, and shallots from seeds. I also started some red onions – the seeds are from year before last, so they are not as viable as I’d like, but I got some to sprout. Onion seeds only last about a year or so – a lot of other seeds are viable for longer. I have been fertilizing my onion sprouts this year – something I read about this winter. I’m hoping that I will have close to pencil-width onions ready to go into the ground by April or May (probably May but a girl can hope for an April warm-up).
I planned this year’s gardens last fall, just drawing up a plan on a couple pieces of paper. I did go through all my seeds this fall, and I made a big spreadsheet so I know what I have to work with. I then had to decide what to NOT grow this year. I tend to want to just grow it all – I am using some restraint and only using about half my seed varieties for this coming year. Below are my plans I drew up:
As you can see, I’ve changed things a little bit here and there – there are some scribbles where I made revisions, but going in I knew a few things we’d do differently this year. We had too many winter squash last year, and I have frozen a lot of them. I fed extras to the deer before they could go bad on us (and because we got really sick of squash). I won’t be growing any winter squash. I’m growing 2 plants of cucumbers (2 varieties, one plant of each). I’m only growing 12 tomato plants total! (I had over 24 last year). We still have a lot of frozen tomatoes. They are good but we were a bit overrun in the fall and I got really tired of harvesting them. The only problem with planning is you never know what the weather in the summer will be like. I hope we have a nice hot summer and those 12 tomato plants actually produce as well as they did last year.
I took the seeds that I decided to grow this year, and set up groups (all rubber-banded together) in terms of when they get started and where – so I have a big group of “start inside in March” that will get started around the first official day of spring. I have a few types of seeds in the fridge cold-stratifying, those all will get started in March – those include two types of Milkweed/butterfly weed. I’d like to get some established in my yard for the Monarch butterflies. I also have some sets of “Start outside” for as soon as the snow is gone and I can get into the soil, and “start outside May/June” for after the last frost (mid-late may, depending on who you ask). I ordered a couple of things that should be coming this spring – Ginger for sprouting (probably coming late March) and also more Strawberry plants – I think those come in April or May.
I’m excited for this year’s upcoming garden. For now I am just looking out the window at our snowy yard and dreaming of spring.
We’ve had a lot of things happening – it was really hot for the beginning of summer, so my garden was growing like crazy. We’ve cooled down a bit for the last few days, and today it got sunny again. Here are some nice pictures of our gardens and yard:
Some bee balm growing against the house. I split this plant – took some and put it in the cottage garden.
Last month, I went out and found that my beautiful herb spiral was ruined by something – we suspect skunks. They moved the rocks, and then have been digging for grubs or something. Some plants survived – they didn’t eat the plants, just messed them up on their way to the grubs.
Here you can see another spot where my spiral was messed up, but not as bad. I tried fixing the spiral for a couple days and then gave up. I will get some motion lights to try to deter the skunks before I try recreating it.
Here is the squash jungle. This part is butternut squash.
Here are a couple baby Gete Okosomin squash. There are tons of them on the 3 plants I am growing.
Here is a Gete Okosomin that we accidentally picked early. It was in a weird spot and I wanted to keep it off the ground – I went to adjust it and knocked it off the vine. It was 6 pounds. They can get up to around 20 lbs when ripe. We cut it up and it was soft like zucchini, so I used it as I would zucchini this week.
Here are the gourd plants. They are both birdhouse gourds. I had a mixed pack – there is one plant that is very tiny by the door in the background. I don’t know that I’ll actually get any gourds from it. I was hoping for a bowl gourd plant. But birdhouse ones are nice. I want to make some cool gourd art eventually.
Here are the gourd flowers. They are really cool, I was expecting them to look like squash flowers. I like how these are growing, they just look really whimsical.
Here are some gourds getting bigger on the vine.
Our giant rogue sunflower (grew from last year’s seed, randomly in the garden). This was just before something knocked it over – it was broken at the base but still connected. I tried tying it up to save it. It still flowered but the leaves look dead.
Here is the bloom – for a few days after I tied it back up, the leaves would wilt by end of day, but be all healthy looking by morning. But for the last few days the leaves have been wilted all day. It now has 3 blooms though, even though the leaves look sad.
Here is my first red sunflower – one I started from seed this year (on purpose instead of volunteer/rogue).
Another picture of the squash jungle, from inside the garden fence.
Here is a terra cotta frog I have in the cottage garden. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)
The terra cotta frog sits under the foxglove. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)
Here is another view of the foxglove. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)
I’m growing Balsam for the first time – the blooms are pretty. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)
Here is a little helper, (well, kind of a big helper), Mr. toad. He was living in the main garden, I found him under my tomatoes.
I’ve been wanting a wind spinner. I have a plastic colorful one, but I wanted a metal one. I had some scrap aluminum sheet, so I made my own. I just made it the other day so I have not seen it actually spin in the wind yet. We’ll see how this works. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)
My Wizard has a friend. This black and white kitty comes to our yard sometimes. She has stayed with various neighbors around here, but I don’t know what home she originally came from. My son named her Shadow. She and Wizzy are good friends. (photo courtesy Elton Powell)
Things are growing really well around here. We’ve had really hot weather, with temps in the 80s and 90s. It’s also been super humid, but we haven’t had a lot of rain – we have been getting rain maybe once every couple weeks, it seems. We got a decent thunderstorm the other night but I’ve been having to keep up with watering everything every couple days so that plants don’t die on me. We haven’t really had to mow our grass much, weirdly. The lack of water is helping us there. Usually our lawn a bit of a jungle. Below are some updated pictures of our yard and gardens:
I’ve been wanting to add Persimmons to my yard for awhile. American Persimmons SHOULD survive here, they are supposedly hardy to zone 4. (we are zone 5). I have been daunted by the prices I’ve seen around, but then a couple weeks ago I saw Musser Forests had a deal on potted ones, I got 2 for $8 each (so a good deal). You need two to get fruit. We will probably have to wait years before that happens, but that is fine.
We found some old chicken wire and made a deer guard for the Persimmon trees. They are settling in wonderfully.
I mulched the rest of the trees up front as well. Our Arborvitae were starting to be lost in the grass, since we can’t mow there anymore. So they, the lilacs, and the elder trees and gooseberry bush all were mulched too.
What a change a week makes! I took the pic on the left last week, and the right one today. With our heat, everything is just exploding out there. The squash plants and the tomatoes are loving this summer.
Here is a Gete Okosomin squash. I’m getting worried that these are going to take over but it will be an adventure training them along my fence. I’ve had to move branches of theirs and of the butternut squash plants a few times already.
Here is the start of a Gete Okosomin squash – I’m hoping this flower was pollinated, and then this fruit will keep growing.
I see a patty pan starting. I’m growing some Gelber Englischer Custard Squash – like an orange patty pan. They are supposed to be really good. I have three other types of summer squash as well, but this is the only patty pan type.
I have tomatoes fruiting all over the place. I’ve been wrangling the plants, tying them up to their trellises. I’m going to have to go in and start cutting some of the lower branches soon, to make it not such a jungle.
Here is my lemon grass. I’m just keeping it in the greenhouse. It seems to be doing pretty well.
My foxglove plant made a new flower stock, which shows that it is settling in where I put it.
My beans are finally getting flowers. These are Roma Bush beans, they are supposed to be a wider green bean. They were slow to start, and then I reseeded and the old seeds came up just after that (of course). And then the deer ate a bunch of the tops, so I was worried I wouldn’t actually get any beans. But this is promising.
Here you can see my gourd plants, trying to reach for the sun. I have now attached a couple of tall sticks to the fence here (thick trellis-like sticks) so that they can keep climbing. I’ll get some pics of those for next time. I’m growing these from a mixed pack of gourds, so I’m not sure what they are – I’m hoping they are birdhouse or this large round kind. (You can make bowls with the large round kind).
We are starting a project – a Moon Garden! I saw an article in a recent Farmer’s Almanac Magazine about moon gardens. So we cleared this wall (the old chicken house) – it had a bunch of junk sitting against it for a long time. We painted it white. Here is the before picture (I of course didn’t think to get the “before” pic before starting to paint it)
Here it is painted. The idea is to have a bunch of white and light colored flowers, mixed with green. When the moon hits the garden, everything should glow nicely and make a nice scene. That is the idea anyway. I have a few plants I want to move, and some seeds I’ve ordered for other things. Then we just have to wait for it all to grow and bloom.
Our strawberries have been coming in well – I had gotten a couple cups a few days ago, and at that time there were a bunch almost ripe and ready to pick. So yesterday morning, I walked out to the strawberry patch to harvest, and came across this sight:
A deer got into my strawberry patch and eaten the tops and the berries off most of my plants. The way they were eaten and the amount taken points to deer. And we have deer in the yard a lot. Here is what the plants were SUPPOSED to look like:
My strawberry plants last week.
Luckily they just got the tops of the plants, so the plants will live to give me strawberries next year. I have it all fenced with a makeshift gate, but the gate had been off, since I don’t have to worry about chickens getting in there. The deer must have figured out she could get in through the open door. The deer also got into the open gate of the cottage garden (which I also had left open since we don’t have chickens anymore) and tried a bunch of other things. She must have thought it was a salad bar:
Some of my green bean plants got the tops taken off.
The deer ate some bean plants, some chard, some lettuce, a bunch of my orach, some Borage and some broccoli. She wanted nothing to do with the huge patch of Kale or Asian greens that the chard and orach were between, for some reason. This deer just came in and had a taste of random things. A lot of herbs were untouched as well, fortunately. I have since made sure that gates are closed, and also got some fence to cover things a bit – I laid pieces of fence a little over so the plants are okay but the deer can’t get to the leaves, just in case they decide to just hop the fence to get some more salad. I was lucky that they didn’t completely devastate anything, but it was close. I only will get a few more strawberries, not the nice crop I was hoping for.
One bright spot was that my poppies are starting to bloom:
I’ve been trying to get poppies started for a few years and usually the seedlings disappear after I plant them. I put a ton in this year and they are all coming up and now this was the first bloom.
We’ve been really busy and the garden is growing well! Here are some pictures of our plants and flowers:
Here are my acorn and spaghetti squash plants. They are doing pretty well.
Here is the cottage garden – I need to get in there and weed. I’m planning on adding some mulch to the paths too, it’s starting to get hard to figure out where to step as I wait for the flowers and other things I’ve planted to grow. At the foreground of this photo are beans and ground cherries.
Here is the garlic and shallots patch. (with a weedy path on the left).
I mulched my haskap/honeyberries the other day. It looks really nice and should keep the grass down. I have fence over them to keep deer from eating the bushes.
We actually have some honeyberries this year! Only a few, but that means our local pollinators have been busy. These bushes don’t self pollinate, they need pollen from another bush to set fruit.
I got some free plants from a friend, we thought they were baby lilacs – they were under her lilac bushes. We didn’t even think “oh, the leaves are not the same” or anything, until the next morning, I realized that I had been mistaken. I put the mystery plants in a spot in the back of the garden to wait and see what they were. I have discovered that these are Valerian bushes. They are starting to flower, and I matched the leaves up with an online search. I will keep them where they are, they should have some nice flowers once they actually finish blooming, and they’re a nice addition to the cottage garden.
Here is one of our peonies (with some comfrey growing around it).
Our lupines are doing well, this is the view standing at our mailbox. These have naturalized since I was little – they used to be at a house down the road, and have spread since then to most of the ditches up and down our street.
My cat Wizard loves to hang out in the garden with us.
I caught this bee mid flight! The bees love our comfrey.
Last year I planted sunchokes, and the deer seemed to eat them all. I didn’t even attempt to dig and see if we got any chokes, because I figured I’d wait and see if any came back this year. I put a fence in this spring to keep the deer out and these are doing well now.
Here is a Mullein that is growing near the sunchokes. I planted some sunflowers near here but they don’t seem to be coming up (it’s a really dry spot, far from where our hose reaches for watering). But the Mullein are loving this spot. There are 3 or 4 large plants like this there.
Here is a shot of my main garden. The plants here are doing well. I have onions, tomatoes, jalapenos, and cauliflower on the right side.
On the left side of my main garden I have more cauliflower, summer squash, cucumbers, and then more tomatoes (near the lemon balm bush at the back). Oh, and a grape vine at the far end.
Another pic of the main garden. I like taking photos through the season to see how it explodes into green once everything starts getting big.
One of my 3 cauliflower patches in the main garden. (We eat a lot of cauliflower).
The garden is doing well, I can’t wait to see how it grows through the summer!
The garden is in full swing. I had it planted by mid may because we had several warm days in a row – the weather report called for a lot more to come, and mostly this has been true. We did get a frost warning on May 31st, so we had to hurry up and cover all our tomato plants, squashes, and a few other things. We didn’t actually get any frost, luckily. We’ve had a lot going on here, check out the pics below:
I planted a bunch of tulip bulbs in the fall, all along our front porch. They’ve been blooming nicely. Here on the right, we seem to have some color changing ones! They started yellow, as you see here.
Here they are yellow. Oh wait, there is an orange one next to them (but the same kind)
Here they are again.
A few days later they were all orange.
Then a day or so later, they turned red. Then the petals all fell off. I’m not sure what kind they are. I bought a mixture of tulips. I like that these ones changed color.
Here is a salamander that we found one day. These guys are so cool.
Here is the ONE morel that I found. I have not found any for a few years. I was out picking mint in a spot where I have mint growing, and I came across this. There were no others there. I’ll have to check that spot next year. It was colder than I thought it would need to be for Morels, so I need to remember that for next year.
I have my Nepenthes pitcher plant hung up in the greenhouse. Our greenhouse has been really helpful this year. I put this guy hanging from the ceiling. It gets lots of humidity and there are a bunch of bugs flying around in there. The bugs fly in and can’t seem to figure out how to get out of the greenhouse. But then they get drawn to the Nepenthes’ pitchers.
I have lemongrass growing this year. I replanted them into this box the other day, since they are getting big. I originally planted them in an old mushroom container. I have tried to grow lemongrass before but they like humidity, so they are going to stay in the greenhouse. I’ve never actually had them get this far before, probably due to lack of heat/humidity.
Here are some of my greenhouse plants. I mostly have things that are waiting to go in the regular garden – a few herbs and flowers that will be put in the cottage garden. I also have some tomato seedlings. (I was trying to start more because we had some issues with tomatoes this year – more on that below).
Here are more greenhouse plants. I have peppers in the front. I may leave them in the greenhouse. I also have extra tomato plants in here.
Here is the ginger I’m growing this year. I started some last year, it really didn’t do a lot – due to lack of heat, I believe. From what I planted I got two little nubs of ginger, which I left in the soil and kept in a mini-greenhouse in my house all winter. This spring they started sprouting. So they are now in the regular greenhouse. Hopefully I’ll get to eat some fresh ginger this year.
Here are some tomatoes. I had some issues with my tomato seedlings this year. I started with 10 varieties, and a few did great, but 7 kinds stunted for some reason (after research I think I overwatered and they were suffering from nutrient deficiencies due to that). I put some of the stunted seedlings in the garden, some in the greenhouse. Some of the garden ones did ok and recovered, but some didn’t. I ended up buying a few heirloom plants from a local greenhouse to make up for the lost time of my stunted plants. Here you can see the purchased plant at the back, and one of my stunted (but recovering) seedlings. I hope we get lots of tomatoes.
Here is a butterfly that we saw in the yard.
I planted some Comfrey several years ago, and they are going strong and spreading a little here. The bees love them and they are pretty, even though their flowers are small.
Here you can see some hollyhock plants. This part of the yard is kind of a bee garden – there are hollyhocks, peonies, comfrey, goldenrod (I just leave for the bees) and some mugwort.
I bought a foxglove plant, and the flowers are coming in. The flower stalk is getting too heavy, I guess, since it had fallen over. I picked it up to get this photo.
Here are the garlic and shallots that I planted in fall. They are all growing in well. I have 4 kinds of garlic, and 2 kinds of shallots here.
The Cottage Garden. (My new name for the old chicken yard). It’s a bit of a mess – we are still cleaning stuff up, and the things I’ve planted are still tiny. But it’s coming together.
Here is my herb and flower spiral. I lined it with rocks, it’s actually a labyrinth path (so you can walk it to the center). I’m slowly adding rocks and plants. I have a lot of things waiting to go in – they are getting bigger in the greenhouse. I have found that transplanting tiny seedlings is too much trouble, so I’ll wait till they are bigger. Next year if I need to, I will direct seed instead of transplanting herbs and things.
Here is another view of the Cottage Garden.
Here is a picture of my cauliflower, these are growing well. I made a cabbage-moth spray with garlic and citrus that I have been spraying on all the brassicas to keep cabbage moths off. So far it’s been mostly successful.
My beans are finally coming up – these are in the cottage garden as well.
Here is a sign that my dear friend Ellen got me a few years ago. She passed away this February. I’m glad I finally have somewhere to put it. It has different sayings so you can change what it says – there’s another one “Lettuce Turnip the Beet” and some other silly ones.
The garden is doing well, I can’t wait to see it all grow in.
My tiny u.p. farm 