Garden tour

I thought I would give you a quick tour of my gardens so that you can situate the various things I talk about on my blog.

​First off, let's look at what I call my kitchen garden. My kitchen garden is where I plant the annual plants that give us most of the veggies we eat year round. It's about 30 by 30 feet, and is fenced in with chicken wire due to a groundhog attack a a few years ago. I have let the weeds grow on the outside of the fence to make a sort of hedge because I don't find the fence particularly attractive, and I feel that the hedge will act as a kind of wind break. I also wonder if it hides the garden from pests to a certain extent. They are likely more clever than that, but it seems to be a deterrent at least. This garden was originally mulched with fabric mulch - medium quality for the crop rows and higher quality for the walkways. I am gradually converting this to natural mulch. This garden is hooked up to an automatic irrigation system fed by rain barrels. Each year I plant it from scratch with a mix of seedlings that I've grown, direct seeding wherever possible, and a few nursery plants (for those types where I only want a few plants).

There are a few annuals that don't fit space wise in my kitchen garden or weren't great fits for the fabric mulch I use in it, and don't require watering - those have been relegated to two long beds in our back field. These house ground cherries, potatoes, onions, carrots and scarlet runner beans. Most of these are mulched with hay, except the ground cherries which are on top of fabric because that makes harvesting the ground cherries so much easier. 

A few years ago I realized that I needed separate beds for perennials. At the time I was using the rototiller in my other gardens, and obviously I didn't want my perennials close to that. There were a lot of issues with "accidental mowing" when I simply integrated them in the landscape, and the detailing around perennials (weed-hacking etc) gets tedious. So, I decided to set up a few perennial beds near the house. I have four beds side by side. Two are strawberry patches. They are conveniently located between the house and my workshop so I can pick up snacks on the way. Rarely do strawberries make it into the house! The third bed has Jerusalem artichoke, rhubarb and horseradish, and a few herbs. The fourth one is a cement planter that was used to store milk jugs before they were brought to the dairy, over fifty years ago. It holds mostly herbs. There are a few irises in there (remnants from when I wasn't sure what I'd use the cement enclosure for and cilantro, which isn't really a perennial but has a neat tendency to reseed itself. Having herbs this close to the house it very convenient for cooking, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Lining the side of our laneway are the fruit trees. I have apple trees that produce consistently (empire and yellow transparent), and pear trees that don't produce yet. There are also lilac trees that I use for lilac lemonade and bouquets. After planting and babying these apple trees, I found out we have several wild apple trees in the forest! Oh well.

In front of the house there is a little honeyberry patch and some flowers. A bit to the left in an odd space of the lawn, there you'll find a sour cherry bush, and some seabuckthorn that I just put in last year (not producing yet). We have a huge front lawn, which we used to cut short but now just let grow naturally- I was shocked when I calculated how much unnecessary emissions I was causing by maintaining it as a lawn... Now, we let it be a meadow and our neighbor cuts it as hay once or twice a year. 

Around the house there are a few flower beds with perennials, many of them were there when we moved in and I've mostly just maintained them although I have added a few lilies and other low maintenance flowers to them. They are not my priority when compared to the more useful crops. We do eat the daylilies and I hear that hostas are edible too but I haven't tried them yet.

There are also quite a few plants integrated around the property here and there, as an "edible landscape". For example here you can see two grape vines around posts in front of the tiny house we build in our field. Elsewhere you'll find ostrich ferns for example. 

Finally there is a lot of good foraging on our property but I'll cover that in a future post! There you will get to meet things like raspberry bushes, wild grapes, stinging nettle, plantain, and sumac.