Hello, steemians, and welcome to my garden, eh!
I haven't done a garden overview post in a while, so I thought now would be a good time to do it since all the planting is done now.
I guess the best way to start this would be a picture of as much of the garden as I can get into the picture. Closest to the viewer is the popcorn area, beyond that is the potato bed with yellow potatoes planted in it. As you can see, not a lot of the potatoes have come up yet, but they're starting to show in spots. To the right side of the picture are 2 of my raised beds. The closer bed has bush green beans in it, the other one has carrots in it. In the far end of the picture, beyond the grass and walkway is the garden bed where I planted the red potatoes. Those are all up now except a couple spots where nothing came up. Outside of the picture to the left side is the container garden and 2 more raised beds, which I will show later in the post.
Here is a better picture of the 2 raised beds along side the main garden. The 2 trees past the end of the raised beds are plum trees.
At the end of the raised beds is a rain water storage container that I also use for watering part of the garden. When the rain collection barrels get full, I pump them out to this container. I have fence picket boards fastened to 3 sides of the metal frame to keep the sunlight from eating the plastic container, and also to make it look a bit better from the street.
Here is the container garden and the raised bed with the tomato plants. In front of the container garden is my strawberry bed. You can also see the greenhouse in this picture. I have tomato plants in the greenhouse.
A closer look at the container garden and the raised bed behind it. The first 4 containers have bush yellow wax beans. The next 2 containers have a sweet banana pepper plant each. After that is a pot with some carrots, a container with 2 cucumber plants, and a container with a "Sweet 100" cherry tomato plant. The last container that's half out of the picture contains a sage plant. In the raised bed behind the containers, I have 8 tomato plants, 4 cucumber plants, and various marigolds to help keep some of the bugs away from the tomato plants.
Close to the container garden is this triangular raised bed that occupies an otherwise unused space. I wasn't going to plant it this year, I had been using the space to store extra dirt. I ended up using most of the extra dirt to fill the new raised bed where the tomato plants are, so I had some extra space available for planting. It seemed like a good place to put the zucchini plants this year. I also started another small compost pile for leaves and kitchen waste such as peelings and coffee grounds. I still need to work on building a better container for the compost pile, but there's no hurry on that. The pot behind the zucchini plants has a rosemary plant that is 2 years old now. I brought it into the house for the winter last fall, so it survived and is doing pretty well outside now.
Next is the garden bed with the red potatoes. I used to have a raised bed on the edge of this but it was falling apart pretty badly this spring, so I took it down and added the space to the garden bed. The 2 shorter rows were planted earlier than the other 2 rows, and were up well enough to hill them up. Along the sidewalk edge of the garden bed is a row of black oil sunflowers that really needs to be thinned out. On the far end of the picture, past the black tank, is the experimental wheat plot, which will be the next picture after this.
The experimental wheat plot. This is an ancient wheat variety called Emmer wheat. This is the wheat that was grown by the Egyptians. The ground cover growing with the wheat is white clover. The raised bed on the other side of the wheat has 4 blueberry bushes that I planted this year. The tree at the end of the raised bed is 1 of our 2 apple trees.
Aside from this garden here at home, I also have a community garden plot that I'm using to grow flour corn, hard beans, and squash in the old "3 sisters" method.
I also have the plants in the greenhouse which I will cover in another post.
I would like to give a shout out to @simplymike for his garden journal challenge post. Here is the link to that.
https://steemit.com/gardenjournal2018/@simplymike/-steemit-community-garden-journal-challenge-2-join-or-resteem-and-win-1528378967
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by my page and checking out my post, eh!
As always, feel free to leave a comment or a question if you would like.
May the Steem Force be with you!
It looks like you have yourself more than a handful, there. :0)
Quite a garden, I must say. I love that overview in the first picture. Because my raised beds are spread all around the garden, I can never include them in 1 picture, lol.
I can’t wait to see how wealthy everything will look once you get a little further in the season. It will be so beautiful (it already is, but I hope you know what I mean)
Thanks!
Yeah, it's a pretty big garden, it's almost impossible to get all of it into 1 picture. :-)
wow! this is a lot of work that looks like its on a busy street! i mean its not in the deep country. amazing! it gives me bravery to do this too. thank you for all the cool layout photos too, great ideas come.
Thank you!
Yes, we live right in town. We have the advantage of a corner lot with a south exposure, so that really helps a lot. It's a residential area so the traffic isn't too bad.
excellent! again, love the photos
Wow, that's a lot to cover but I love your garden, so much food can be planted there, I envy you... hahaha
Thank you!
It's a lot of work, but it produces a lot of food, so that's a good thing.
I can imagine the hours need to spend just to take care of this, but you are right, it's all worth it at the end.
amazing. i will post photos of what we have here in chicago in our yard soon. we have 4 of those water collection tanks, with a large gutter on our roof that runs all the rainwater into them, the problem is, they are not raised up 4 feet above the ground like yours is, so there is not very much gravity pressure to shoot it out the hose. none the less, i just fill up my little sprayer with the unchlorinated rainwater so to mix it with Effective Microorganisms that i happily spray on the plants.. cool photoS!
Thanks for stopping by and checking out my post!
I'd really like to know more about that hemp paste that you posted about several weeks ago!
oh great! Yeah I swear by that stuff. I always include a little Hemp paste jar in the footer of my posts :) So, yeah, its WHOLEPLANT cbd, with all the cannabinoids intact, not an oil extract. The company that sells it is called My Nutracuticals, and I am a sales Rep for them :) They cross bred a strain of cannabis to have <0.3% THC and around 19% cbd. So its legal in all 50 states. its also much more effective that oil tinctures, because all the cannabinoids need to synergistically work together on the endocannabinoid system. I found out about the stuff from Ken Rohla, a health educator from florida who helped heal Martin Luther King’s mother. here is a minute of him speaking about it.
And here is another video I collaged from an interview with him talking about the legality and how well it detoxes the body. Personally, ever since i started taking it, I have extreamly memorable and vivid dreams!! I have helped people get off anti depressants, actually a person on steemit, @chelsea88, I got her off anti depressants :)
The company is run by 3 people in Colorado, great people. i run an instagram for it @hemp_paste . while its still expensive its the cheapest and most Effective Cbd product on the market. and no ody knows about it lol.
So yeah let me know if you have any questions, and use this link if you decide to shop, so I can get a cut :)
http://mynutra.com/zg
Thanks for the information and the link!
its looking great amber... im very impressed!
Thank you! :-)
You have a hell of a good size plot there and such a variety.
What did you use for the garden edging?
Thank you!
I use pretty much anything I can get my hands on for garden edging. Boards, old rubber backed rugs cut in long strips, a couple of plastic truck bed liners that I cut into long strips with a sawzall, some old worn out tread mill belts that were given to me...if grass can't grow up through it and it doesn't fall apart quickly, I'll use it.
Looking great. What are you planning on doing with the wheat?
This year is just an experiment to see if the wheat will grow here. If it works well and we get enough to harvest, a lot of it will probably be saved for seeds for next year for a larger plot.
If it all works out, what do you want to do with it? Flour? Spirits? Or maybe you just enjoy Amber waves of grain? Haha. Get it. Amber waves of grain. Either way, I am always impressed by all the cool projects you have going on. You are a busy lady.
I think the plan was to use some of it for flour and some for making beer...
Somewhere on one of my old picture disks, there's a picture titled "Amber waves with grain" :-)
Super impressed! Happy harvesting.
thank you!
That's what we call, "A busy garden"! You sure are a glutton for punishment! I love it.....
Yeah, it's a lot of work to get it all planted, but the end result is worth it. :-)
This was our survival garden for a few years when we were really broke.