A New Way To Garden…

"A garden requires patient labor and attention. 
Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions.
They thrive because someone expended effort on them."
Liberty Hyde Bailey

As long as I have been blogging I have been sharing my love of gardening.  My successes and my failures.
This year my raised beds had finally told me that they were finished.  The wood on the beds were at the point where we were going to have to redo all of them…they were falling apart from the years of sun and rain beating down on them.

Last year with all of my good intentions, the vegetable gardens were neglected.  I was just too darn busy to keep up with everything and they were the one thing I let go, and it made me sad to look at it.  We still reaped a lot of deliciousness from them, but a lot went to waste as well, which I didn't feel good about.  Sometimes 24 hours in a day is not enough is it?

This year money has been a little tight since I changed my website…another story for a blog post about SEO soon., so I spent a lot of time thinking about making gardening fun and manageable again…and affordable as amending the big beds each Spring is expensive.

We are a much smaller family now that the kids are all mostly on their own, so there really is no need for me to produce the volume of food that I did when they were growing up.
I thought about the things that we enjoy most from the gardens….

Lettuce…we eat a lot of salads all year round and it's really nice when you can go out into the garden and cut your own for a salad…I love it!
Thus the new lettuce bed with basil growing in between.  We use basil all year round and it's so easy to freeze.

Another must have is my herb bed.  I love growing and drying herbs. 
Having them to use all year round is always a treat. 
I have a new herb this year called "Curry Plant"  It's the one right in the front center, which is going to be moved to the back center now that I know how tall it will grow.  I think it will be an interesting addition to the family of herbs that we enjoy.
Some of the herbs are going into individual pots…the ones that if left to their own devices can take over a garden, such as my chives.  The mojito mint another garden hog will live in the whiskey barrel flower grouping by the stairs. 
I look forward to using this herb in mojitos this summer.. 😉

I have never been a huge tomato fan even though I love the flavor of tomato…it's a texture thing for me in it's original state
. 
Now that the kids who were veracious tomato eaters are gone, I decided that one grape tomato plant would be enough.  We do use a lot of these over the summer in different dishes, so one patio grape plant is all I will have. 
This big table will be going away soon and the tomato plant will live in a new plant stand.

The beds I am using are made by a company called Veg Trug. I have 2 of them now and will add a third one when I can for the single plant vegetables that I will grow such as Broccoli, Peppers (hot and sweet), radishes, carrots and a few others, but the season is late now, so there is no hurry to add that third bed yet, until it's time to plant fall garlic.

You can purchase different cover to extend the garden season which is awesome. One to shade the lettuces, one to keep the pesky bugs away and a greenhouse shade….but the beauty of these beds is that they are very manageable for my back.

I thought about giving up the gardens, but at the end of the day, I just couldn't.
Gardening is in my blood and it always gives me so much summertime enjoyment.  This is definitely a new way of doing things, but I think the smaller volume and the elevated beds will make it so much easier.

Garden on!

Save

Save