Hi Everyone!
Last week I shared a picture of my garden. I was amazed at how many people responded! I mean, I love my garden, just as a parent loves their child even when they have smeared peanut butter and jelly all over their face, but I know only too well that my little garden is far from the garden that exists in my thoughts. . . you know, that garden where a weed never shows it's face, the weather is always delightful, no plants ever die and no "stingy things" as my daughter calls them would ever fly around and pester. THAT garden! My little back yard garden--or more specifically, side yard garden is unfortunately a far cry from THAT garden. I told a friend who commented on my garden picture that when the weather becomes unbearably hot as it does tend to do here in Tennessee summers, I call over my shoulder "Fend for yourselves" as I run as fast as I can towards the air conditioned house! I guess I am only a "sorta" devoted garden parent, not a "REAL" devoted garden parent!
But that said, I do enjoy my garden, and at the same time I also definitely am gardening frugally, so given the interest my garden picture generated I thought I would give a little "garden tour" this week. Now remember--this is NOT the garden you will find in Better Homes and Gardens magazines! So I have warned you. Be gentle. Don't say anything that might hurt my plants feelings. You know they are listening, don't you?
To find my little garden, you would slip on a pair of the rubber garden shoes that live near my kitchen back door, and stroll into the back yard. Hang an immediate left, and you will come to this pretty trellis that my sweet hubby built for me. We WERE going to leave it just natural wood with a little stain on it, but THAT was before those nasty bees that drill their holes into wood found it and started drilling great long holes into it all over. Bad bees!!!! I read that they usually leave painted wood alone, so we filled the holes with calk and painted the trellis the closest brown paint color that I could find that looked sorta like the natural wood color that it was pre-paint. Painting it wouldn't have been half bad, except that my giant rose bush had already had a season or two of growing up it, so it wasn't easy to remove the rose from the trellis without painting or breaking the rose--but for the most part we managed. That, plus the fact that roses are fairly hardy. Which is a good thing, when they come to live at MY house! ;). My rose right now is rather lopsided and only on one side of the trellis. That is because for a long time, there WAS only one rose growing up one side of it. I had previously planned on putting a different color rose up the opposite side, but well, that never happened and besides that would mean that I needed to purchase another rose, and they are not cheap! So instead, I finally decided to stick a cutting from my current rose into a pot of dirt and see if it would root. It did, and now I have a small rose bush of the same variety climbing up the opposite side of the trellis. Give it a year or two more, and I suspect it will catch up with the other side! And happily, it was free--just needs a bit of patience for it to have a chance to grow.
In this picture taken this morning, this rose is really past it's prime. But for the previous month, it has been just loaded with the most adorable, tiny, delicate blooms. And yes--it is rather a mess up on top there. But even when I drag a ladder out, I still cannot properly reach and tame all that is growing on top, so I have decided to just embrace the mess and tell the rose how much I love it, and thank you for growing and not dying!
When you walk under the arbor, make sure you pause long enough to gaze up at the nest that is above your head. And don't be scared by the rustle in the leaves as a bird takes flight. This is at least the third year in a row that we have had a cardinal nest in this arbor. Smart bird. If YOU could build your nest anywhere you wanted, wouldn't YOU choose a rose covered arbor?
Below is a picture of the arbor from a week or two ago, when it was still in full bloom.
And this picture shows a close up of the sweet little blooms this rose grows. It is an unnamed variety, but is very old in origin.
Once you are through the arbor and finished trying to figure out if mama cardinal has babies in that nest yet or not, you come to the main part of our garden. Again, this is a work in progress, not by any means a finished perfect garden. For a long time, our garden was simply a large rectangle covered with black plastic. This is why you can see the patch there with no grass growing in it. Because we are expanding our garden area a few beds each year, we are not doing anything about this bare spot because it will eventually be covered--or mostly covered--with more garden beds. If there are any bare spots at that time, we can always get a bit of grass seed to fill in. But for now, I just close my eyes as I pass by. . .
We have a HUGE bumper crop of bunnies each year. That is probably what grows the very best in our garden! Well, what grows best next to our garden anyway, because I am pretty sure that most of them are under those large bushes you can see in the picture behind the windmill in the above photo. It is because of these that we have the bunny fencing around our garden beds. As we add more beds each year, we just keep moving the little T posts and the bunny wire to surround the new beds. But just look into those sweet deep brown eyes. . . don't you think they are worth all the trouble they cause us?
And no, I do not feel guilty at all for fencing them out of our garden. After all, we grow them about an acre and a half of clover and other yummy weeds they can munch on!
As you can see in the previous garden photo, for right now, our garden gate is simply a large piece of rigid plastic that we slip between several T posts. Eventually we hope to have something pretty for a gate, but for now we simply needed something that would come down to the ground and keep the above mentioned bunnies out. So when my hubby found this piece of plastic hanging around in the basement and slipped it in, we have been using it for a couple years now and it works just fine! That is part of gardening frugally--using what you have, and being creative. Even if the item was not specifically made for the purpose you are now using it, if it works--and it is already paid for since you already have it, then that is what counts!
This first bed on our right is my new blackberry bed. I am just putting this in this spring, so it is not well established yet. This was one of the two new garden beds that my hubby built for me this spring. These are not raised beds, but really just framed beds. When he builds one for me, if there is grass there I ask if he will weed wack real short, and after he does then I take over with whatever I am going to put in that bed. Almost all the rest of my garden was free this year, but when I saw these blackberries--thornless, and a compact growing variety--I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to try them. It is just for fun, as there is no way I can grow as many as our family would LIKE to eat. But this is my hobby, and my hubby loves to build things with wood--so it is a hobby that he enjoys as well. AND our teen age daughter loves this garden as well, and I would by far rather have her puttering out in the garden with me than any number of other things a teen girl "could" be up to these days. . . so when I came home from looking at this blackberry variety and told my husband about it, he looks at me and said "So BUY one!" I did, and then of course wished I had a second one. He looks at me and said that HE would buy a second one for me, and then I could be "mad" at him for spending money and not feel bad about it myself! ;). Of course I would not be mad, but I do tend to be the more frugal one, so together we make a good team! To my delight, when I went to plant the second blackberry bush that my husband "ordered" that I get, I found that it actually had a baby plant that had come up from the roots in the same pot. So that was a frugal "Buy one bush, get a baby bush free" type of deal! I had been hoping that over time I could get some more plants coming up from the roots, but it is really nice to start out with one! I carefully separated it from the parent plant, and it is the tiny plant you can see in this picture in-between the two larger ones. It is too soon to see if it will survive the transplant shock yet, but I am hoping good things for that baby!
You can also see in the picture how I help keep weeds down in my garden--my secret is cardboard I drag home for free from the grocery store (thank you Aldi's!), plus mulch. After you plant your garden, a nice layer of cardboard and mulch will help smother all that grass and stuff that you just covered up, as well as break down over time and help feed your soil. I do not own a tiller, and I do not plan on purchasing one either. For my small garden, it is not necessary, and that way I do not have costs for gas or repairs either.
Just past my blackberry bed you will come to the raspberry bed. This is new this year as well, thanks to a wonderful friend who invited my daughter and I to come over and dig up extra raspberry plants that were threatening to take over her entire garden. So back in the winter, we hopped over to her house with a couple boxes and shovels and came back with these rather dead looking stick things. I poked them in this empty garden bed, put down cardboard and mulch, and hoped for the best! This spring, I was so excited to see new little leaves sprouting out on them! They were alive!!! Then we discovered we had a huge pine tree that was literally pulling out of the ground and would fall on our house. ;(. A good friend offered to help us out, and came over and felled the tree for us--yea for wonderful friends! Sadly, to have the tree not hit the house, that meant he had to take it down so that it would fall on the garden--smack dab across the raspberry bed! But God blessed, the tree came down safely for both people and house, AND only some of the raspberry canes were snapped off from the tree landing on them. Most of them survived just fine! Yea! So this is my free raspberry bed!
Here you can see both the new blackberry bed going in, as well as the already planted raspberry bed. I ran out of mulch this morning when I was mulching the blackberries, but I put what I had around the plants and will add more as I get some. For now, the mulch that is there will still help keep moisture around the newly planted blackberries.
Continuing on from the raspberry bed we come to a tomato bed. I am trying to rotate where the tomatoes get planted each year. This helps cut down on soil-borne diseases that they can be prone to. This bed is filled with a variety called "Rutgers." I started them from leftover seeds that were several years old. I wasn't sure if they would sprout or not--but they did! So the plants were "free" since I already had the seeds, and the tomato cages we reuse year to year. Even the black plastic in this bed was old leftover plastic from last year's garden. Now I know what you are thinking--black plastic isn't going to break down and help feed my soil. But remember, I DID tell you that mine is not a perfect garden, right? The plastic helps keep weeds down, because I just do not have all day long to spend in the garden, and neither do my husband nor my daughter. So black plastic nicely stands guard against weeds in the tomato beds! If the planting is more permanent, I try and mulch it. But if it is an annual type of plant, I will often use black plastic.
After the Rutger tomatoes, we come to a small "connecter bed." This was my brain storm last year, as I was trying to figure out how we could "frame" our entire garden area so we could bark the pathways to help keep weeds down. having a few connecter beds that go between our larger beds did the trick nicely! I just keep these small beds dirt without a mulch or black plastic in them. Last year I grew a wonderful crop of lettuce in one of them. They are just large enough to grow something, yet small enough that the weeds that come up are manageable. This year, this bed here has a cherry tomato in the back with a trellis that we will tie it to, and some sunflowers in the front part of the bed. I planted four sunflower seeds, but only three of them came up.
This is the front corner bed in the garden, and is my daughter's perennial flower bed. She wanted a place that she could plant whatever she wanted when she was quite a bit younger, so I gave her this bed. Over the years she has had different things in it. Currently you can see the pink primrose that is quite happy and taking over an entire half of her garden. It would love to take over the entire garden, but she has decided she will give it a full half and whoever creeps over the half way line will get pulled! She also has some Butterfly Weed that is almost ready to bloom, a purple Day Lily that has budded but is not blooming yet, some Shasta Daisys, Purple Coneflower, and two varieties of Coreopsis.
Next is another small connector bed that has two cherry tomatoes tucked in the back, and my daughter has planted two rows of zinnias in front.
Then the next large bed is my "Butterfly Bed." I am currently putting cardboard down, and when I get more mulch will put that on top. I have never mulched this bed before, and it needs it because I could use the help against the weeds that love this bed! This bed has Rue--an herb--growing in one half of it, and Butterfly Weed growing in the other half. The Rue I started from seeds that I gathered from my Rue plant I had planted in my previous house in Texas. I still remember the day I bought that original little tiny Rue plant, in a four inch pot from a Herb Farm in Fredericksburg Texas. I brought it home and planted it in hopes of it attracting butterfly caterpillars, since the tag said it was a host plant for several varieties. The tag was right! Swallowtails especially love it! We have gathered countless Swallowtail caterpillars over the years, and raised them as part of our homeschool Science. When I discovered we were moving to Tennessee, I collected a few tiny seeds from it and carried them with me here. This is what people used to do--they couldn't always just go to the local plant nursery and buy new plants! People took cuttings, shared seeds, etc. In a different part of my yard, I have a yellow rose that came from a cutting a friend gave me. The lady who gave a cutting to my friend said that rose had crossed the country in a covered wagon with one of her relatives! I love history like that! The Butterfly Weed I grew from a packet of seeds several years ago, and it keeps reseeding and coming back. I have hoped I would get a Monarch caterpillar on it as it is a host plant for them, but have not found one yet. But scores of other butterflies stop by to feed on it so I am not disappointed in the least!
This adorable bird house is a new addition to the garden this year. My daughter and husband built it and painted it for my birthday last summer--didn't they do a great job? I think they did! It has a sail boat on the other side, that you can't see in this picture. I have caught a glimpse of a bird flying away from it several times already, but have not seen well enough to know for sure what type of bird has discovered it.
Well, I hope you are enjoying this garden tour! It is getting bit long, and we are only half way through the garden, so I think I will continue this in a "Part 2" later on. Do you garden? If so, do you save seeds, receive pass a longs from friends, or purchase what catches your eye at a nursery? I would love to hear about your garden!
~Susan
