The Garden

Vegetable gardens aren’t for everyone – I understand that. Often when I pass a yard that’s manicured and neat, doesn’t have hoses and weird tubs sitting around everywhere, I think that yard is beautiful and I laugh thinking about what they would think if they saw our yard.

This was our back yard four years ago.

This is what I see when I walk out the back door today.

We’ve put up a fence. We’ve planted 1 cherry tree, 5 raspberries, 4 pear trees, 3 fig trees, what seems like 100 elderberries and a pretty lilac tree where we buried Rita and Boots. There are raised beds and mineral tubs and some grow bags and some 5 gallon buckets. I don’t think it looks bad. My neighbors might disagree. Thank goodness they don’t really see it all because of the fence.

When I walk out the back door, this is the first sight I see. Asparagus in that first bed (partially in the photo). Behind that first asparagus bed is a bed with beets but potatoes seem to have popped up in it too. Left (center foreground) bed was supposed to be a second asparagus bed but I can’t seem to get all the potatoes out of that bed and they take over every year. Behind that bed is arugula that I’m letting to go seed so I’ll have that for next year and horseradish. Back to the foreground far left is garlic. There’s another garlic bed farther back that you don’t see. Once that comes out, I’ll plant okra there. Towards the back that you can partially see are two more 4 x 8 beds with lettuce, collards, bok choy and spinach. As soon as that is done – probably sooner rather than later because we have a 90 degree high this week – I’ll pull all that out and plant purple hull peas. I will freeze dry all the greens, make them into a powder and use them in smoothies, gravies, even in our scrambled eggs. There’s a raised bed you don’t see with onions and two of the big water tubs that have onions in them. There’s one more raised bed with rhubarb that was pretty much ruined by the hail. Not sure if I’m going to get enough new growth to harvest before it gets too hot.

There’s the back garlic bed. It looks much better in this picture than in real life. Lots of hail damage to the garlic. Hopefully the bulbs are ok. It’s just now starting to produce scapes. General rule of thumb is that the bulbs are ready to harvest three or four weeks after the scapes are removed. I’m guessing the back bed that gets the most sun should have scapes ready to harvest by the first week in June so I should be able to pull the garlic by the end of June or first week in July, which is pretty much when I usually do it.

We have elderberries inside the fence and outside the fence. These were planted two years ago from cuttings off our other elderberries. Just pruned the others, poked the sticks in the ground and this is what we got.

There are peach, plum, nanny berries, choke cherries, sumac and quite a few other trees outside the fence that we’ve planted.

These are potatoes growing in the mineral tubs. I think I have 13 of these planted with potatoes, along with 6 five gallon buckets and the volunteers in the raised beds. You can see the walking onions in the background.

These are my very sad tomatoes. My neighbor gave me some but I have a feeling very few of the ones that were damaged are going to survive. They are not looking good. I may end up having to buy a few tomatoes, which I haven’t had to do in years.

We’ll see . . we have a good chance of severe weather towards the end of next week so I’m not doing anything til after then.

I do love my garden. There’s going to come a time when I can’t do as much as I do now but I tell myself I will not be sad. I’ve always had so much fun gardening and when I can’t or shouldn’t be out gardening, that will give me more time for sitting with Oscar and Cooper and cross stitching . . and that’s fun too!