Garden 2025 Update #6: My Early June Garden

I composed & meant to update this 10 days ago.  In the last 10 days things look much different so the July update will be a lot of fun, seeing the tremendous difference!

I've used this method before for my beets & carrots and it worked really well so I thought 

I'd see how it might work to protect my onions from the chipmunks. They just love onions.

So far it's a 100% effective deterrant after being in place for the last 11 days. 

Green beans coming up nicely.  

It never ceases to amaze me how drastic the view from the deck can be from one season to the next. 

48 hours of heavy winds lead to an emergency stake-up of most of the garlic. 

It's been a weird spring. The Roma tomato plants are small but they're producing. 

I plan out my garden months in advance and knew a year ago I wouldn't be growing potatoes this year. 

And then I found one tucked away in a veggie basket, out of sight, that had begun to chit. 

Immediate change of plans 😂

This year's potato is a single medium size Russett. 3 pieces in each pot. 

It'll be fun Potato Math to see how many come from a single potato. 

Looking to add some pretty pops of color, I added two new Butterfly Bushes. 

I can't describe how magical they smell other than to say it's birthday cake & love. 💖

Another new addition this year are these adorable pansies. 

I've transplanted nearly 100 strawberries this year and there's 4 different kinds.

This pretty, deep pink blossom variety is so pretty! 

The oldest garden tool in my possession, from back when things were made to last.

This is entirely made from diecast metal, handles to blades, springs, levers, nuts & bolts.

One of my grandma's most used, she parted with it & gifted this to me in 1983.

I grew up in her back yard and watched her use this tool at least thousand and one times. 

 I've never oiled or sharpened it, and would love to restore it one day. 

I used it today, and it works just as awesome as it did 42 years ago. 

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you're encouraged by what you've read here, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel welcome to leave a comment. 😊

Garden Basics: Getting Started - Easy Tips for Best Success

While I'm not a professional grower/gardener/homesteader by any stretch of the imagination, I've been growing quite a lot of my own food for the last 6 seasons and have been asked a few times to share my experience in urban gardening. So I'll try to keep this really short and share what has worked best for me.  I hope this helps & encourages anyone looking to begin the fun, rewarding and exciting experience of growing their own food. 

• Find & Follow YT channels

Whenever I first decided I was going to turn my back yard into a food forest, I sought out urban homesteading videos to see what others were doing & how they were doing it.  I literally typed in "urban homesteading in [my city/province] what grows best". If you do this, it will start you down a really great path to see what others are doing and how you can learn from them. You'll learn a lot, so I highly recommend subscribing and following. Doing this will also help you learn what hardiness zone you're in - which essentially means your last & first frost dates of the season and helps you plan your garden overall, based on those *rough* dates. 

• Start Small & Learn All the Things

The first year I grew anything I built 2 small tomato boxes and had 6 pots of peppers, and 4 hanging baskets of strawberries. All season long I researched everything I could think of for tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. I watched all the videos & read all the articles. From fertilizer suggestions, soil amendments, composting suggestions, and just about everything in between.  I've since learned digging deep like that, you'll learn a lot of basic gardening info, that really applies to all plants.

• Composting

There's a thing called "lazy composting" and I'm a part of that community even though I agree composting is literally invaluable in home gardening. I have a compost bin I toss all my kitchen scraps & garden waste into.  I never turn it like you're supposed to, and I never water it like you're supposed to.  I pile it deep and once every year or so, the most amazing, rich, nutrient dense dirt comes out the bottom, that I use to top dress all my garden beds. There are definitely better ways to use it, but this is what works for me. If you're looking for best practices, dig a bit deeper into the topic and you'll find lots of ways to really boost your composting efforts!

• Grow What's Native & 2.What You Eat

While it would be wonderful for folks in Alaska to be able to plant pineapple & have it grow well... that's just not how it works. Two of the most important questions to ask yourself when growing, is what's native & grows well where you are, and what do I/we actually eat & enjoy? The answers to both of those questions will be what gets you really excited about growing.  Does your whole family love peppers and do they grow really well where you are? If you can answer an exciting YES to those questions, you've just hit a jackpot in planning your garden. 

•  The Dirty Dozen

Every year the list goes out on the top 12 fruits and veggies highly contaminated with the most toxic pesticides.  These are the fruits & veggies you're buying from the local grocery store. (There's also a Clean 15 so be sure and google that list as well!) If any of the items on this list are items that you buy often (grocery store strawberries are almost always at the very top of the list!), you may want to consider a way to incorporate these fruits and veggies into your garden planning, so that you and your family can still enjoy them without all the toxic pesticides they come with, from the local grocer.  

• Vertical Gardening

With limited space these days in a lot of places, vertical gardening is super popular.  One of my favorite ways to utilize this method is what are called Galvanized Steel Wire Mesh panels from Home Depot here in Canada.  In the states, these same panels are called Cattle Panels and made of the same material. In my garden I have 2 of these for my cucumber trellis, and 3 of them bound together with 4 t-posts for my green bean trellis, and then another one for my blackberries.  It's a very simple and easy way to make the most of the space you have by growing vertically. There are many other options with tower raised pots but I've only ever utilized the wire mesh panels. 

• Raised Beds

While raised beds are certainly not required, if your growing space is filled with rocks or clay or similar unfriendly growing material, raised beds may be your best option. In my case, my land is filled with old fieldstone and there's so much of it, it was hard to dig or plot to grow anything.  So, I built two 4'x8' raised beds and filled them with rich, dark garden soil & compost, then planted tomatoes and peppers. They exploded the first year and have ever since, so now I know what those plants love the most. 

Thanks for stopping by, and if this post helped you in any way, then I'm really glad.  💖

Please feel welcome to leave a comment or question. 

Touching Grass & Getting Out the Paints!

Several different articles, podcasts, videos & memes have come up lately that have drawn my attention to how so many people are struggling with our "time spent online" in various ways and across various formats. Which, to me, is kind of a red flag that lots of different people are getting the same vibe that something about it just doesn't seem right. Or, porpotionate. Or something.  It seems pretty clear, all sorts of people are noticing it doesn't feel right. 

One example was this from 2024 recently making the rounds again on social media, showing how and where people spend their time from 1930 to 2024.  I can't vouch for it's accuracy but I suspect anyone viewing agrees at how fast things have drastically changed. I don't think of myself as someone who spends a ton of time online but when I see things like that, I'm even more determined to spend way more time outside & offline. 

Where I live in southern Ontario Canada, as long as the weather allows, I'm outside. Generally barefoot, and in the dirt.  It's just what feels right to me. As much as I'm able, I'm outside and today was no exception. I planted out my sweet onions, got rid of a bunch of junk that's been piling up, re-installed a downspout & picked up a cute new garden decor item.

This was completely unplanned, but after I picked this up I absolutely had to re-paint this cute, tin hummingbird wind chime. Nothing like a 4 hour unplanned painting session on the deck to completely de-stress & enjoy the early spring sunshine on the deck.

There's also nothing like picking up your paint pens & paints and brushes and remembering how much you miss it. I should most certainly be doing more of this! 

Thanks for stopping by.  As always, I hope you're encouraged by what you've read here, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel welcome to leave a comment. 😊

Garden 2025 Update #5: Pictorial Garden Tour and a Triple Garden Mystery!

Welcome to my fun pictorial garden tour. 🌿I hope this blesses, inspires and encourages you in some wonderful way. 😊

The best of the garden from April 14th through May 20th.  This is spring in southern Ontario, zone 6a: 

Both of these guys think they're my garden assistants. 

Noobies on the left, and Ed on the right.

Both of them follow me around while I work in the garden.  😍

Early spring solar lighting accents in the very empty garden. 

Ed in complete control of the garlic/pepper bed. 

Hardneck garlic on the edge of the pepper bed. 

Mama Robin moved 3 of these eggs and left the fourth one. 😢

While I began the hardening off process for my tomatoes and peppers, my foyer almost looked like walking into an indoor nursery. 😄

Plsease allow me to introduce you to Thinking Harry. My youngest daughter found him and immediately decided he needed a home in our garden. Harry will live in the blackberry bed for now.

The lovely bloom of the Italian Prune tree.  💖

Beautiful welded dragonflies by my youngest in her last year of high school shop class. 💖

 

Three different colors of Forget Me Nots, all in one lovely bunch. These volunteer all over my back garden just about everywhere you look. 💖

Mr. Possum tried sneaking out early but I saw him & he slowly waddled back under the deck.  

My first strawberry bloom 

Seeing all the new growth on the grapevines just makes me so happy 😍

The chamomile I winter sowed and it's doing just fantastic. 

I find these little metallic stars in random places in my yard. Some gold, some silver. It's wild!

The view from the lawn swing. I love my tiny little garden. 

First sauce tomato of 2025

All the peppers are doing fantastic

The view from the deck May 16th

Help me solve a TRIPLE garden mystery 🌿🔎

What kind of bug is this on the peppermint?

Likewise... what kind of bug is this, on another peppermint plant?

What kind of plant is this? This is a volunteer & I've never seen it before. 

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you're encouraged by what you've read here, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel welcome to leave a comment. 😊