raised beds

Mid summer garden updates 2025

Jen PowellLeave a comment

The garden is really doing well. Here are some updated pictures:

Here is the main garden. Everything is doing well. I’ve replaced a couple of things (picked all my rat tail radishes, added in a tomato plant, things like that).
Garlic Scapes
Rat tail radish

I’m getting some garlic scapes now. I grew spring garlic (planted this spring after cold stratifying it in the fridge for a month or two). When I grow fall garlic, the scapes are usually here in June if I’m remembering correctly. This garlic is giving me scapes now, in early August. I’m figuring bulbs will be ready later as well since it was planted later.

I had a large harvest of rat tail radishes – they are seed pods from a radish variety that doesn’t actually produce a large root. Those are now out, and that will give my green beans some room to grow.

Tomato plants
Delicata Squash

I’m starting to get small tomatoes forming on my plants. I’ve also taken cuttings – I took the suckers out of the plant and put them in water. The cuttings formed roots and I’ve put them into my beds as well, to see if we can get some later tomatoes. I figured it’s worth a try. I also am starting to get some delicata squash on my squash plants. I didn’t know how they’d do in the raised bed situation but it seems to be growing pretty well.

I’ve got some flowers blooming now, these are zinnias. My plan was for a bunch of different colors all over the garden – I put in some black and red petunias that I bought, and a fluffy red flower (I can’t remember the name). Of the seed-grown flowers, so far I’ve just gotten these yellow zinnias and some yellow calendula.

goldenrod with a sleeping bee
goldenrod and comfrey

Outside the main garden, I have some areas of flowers – a mix of native stuff and some things I planted. I was looking around the yard the other day and found that my goldenrod/comfrey/mugwort bed area had a lot of bee activity. Some of them were sleeping on the flowers (it was pretty early yet).

Black currants. I just harvested a bunch of these y/esterday and made some syrup. It was good on pancakes. It was pretty tart, so I needed to add a bunch of sugar. I have only had these canned before, this was the first harvest of a usable amount I’ve gotten.
A view of our back yard, toward the cottage garden. I mostly have perennials in there now, it gets overrun with Valerian and nettles. The white topped flowers in the picture above are the Valerian. I pick the nettles to keep them somewhat contained but they like to spread a lot – I pick the small ones when I find them and put them in soup. The valerian is everywhere but it smells so nice that I don’t really mind. I put a peach tree in the cottage garden this spring and moved my elderberry trees into there a month ago (those were in the front and not very happy – bad rocky soil). I was growing some herbs and stuff in there but perennials work better for me in there – I can mostly just let them do their thing. I leave it a bit wild but it looks nice. The cats like to hang out in there and sunbathe.
The chickens saying hello

The chickens are growing well. I set up a table and chairs next to their coop and like to hang out with them a bit. My cats sit around their coop as well – I do think they may be more interested in the tasty birds inside than being friendly. The chickens don’t seem to mind the cats, since they can’t get to them. I have come out and found a deer investigating them a few times. The chickens didn’t seem worried about the deer.

Summer is in full swing.

Start of 2025 Garden

Jen PowellLeave a comment

I had some trouble with last year’s garden. I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in 2023, which is a form of heart failure. I’m doing well with medication, but it does slow you down a lot. I noticed the most problem with bending and trying to weed or dig garden beds. I had a garden last year but it was not very well tended, because I just couldn’t, and so my harvest wasn’t as plentiful as it could have been. I had a few things that did well, especially if the soil was good (my cottage garden had some indigo and that did really well), but my main garden tends to get compacted a lot. For this year I got some new raised beds. They were just metal raised beds from Amazon. I ordered 6, set them up, and filled them with leaves, compost, and soil. I did a bit of a lasagna garden in them, just to keep my soil costs down a little. Here they are, set up:

My raised beds. Some had to be on pallets because the ground wasn’t very even.

The beds are waist-height, so they are just at the right level for me. I am so excited to garden in these this year. My husband told me I should order a couple more, so I did – those will be coming in the next week sometime. I planted seeds this week, so those should start coming up soon. I have some seedlings hardening off right now (tomatoes) but I just saw that we have a frost advisory for tonight so those will be coming inside tonight.

I put garlic in one of the beds for this summer, to try a spring-garlic trick that I read about. I had a really good harvest of garlic last fall, I think partially because they are a low-effort crop. I didn’t plant any in the fall though because I knew we’d be doing raised beds and didn’t want to take any space in the garden for them at the time. I read that you can plant it in the spring. Sometimes they won’t develop heads then, unless you cold stratify in the fridge. So I put some heads of garlic in the refrigerator sometime in March, and planted those in one of my raised beds the other day.

Besides the raised beds, we are doing a small Sunflower patch in the garden, and then raising potatoes in dog food bags:

Here are my potato bags. We put bamboo sticks up to prevent the dogs from messing with them or peeing on them when they come into our garden with us.

So far this year seems to be quite promising. Once we quit getting frost advisories anyway.