Can I show you my garden?
This is, beyond a shadow, the most beautiful, flower-filled, viney, better-homes-and-gardens, fairy dust, glossy magazine centerfold, rockstar, dreamboat, fairest-of-them-all, wish-upon-a-star, garden of dreams garden than I’ve ever grown before….
I took first-planted pictures to include, so you can see how it has grown!
Here it is now:
These are still the spring flowers – gradually being tugged out and seeds saved for next season – shungiku, Love-in-a-mist (nigella or black cumin), dianthus, honeywort, black prince snap dragons, strawflower, and scarlet legion poppies.
For the first time ever, sweet peas are blooming in my garden. I didn’t know they smelled so sweet.
A month ago, i harvested the barley. It wasn’t a good harvest. A heavy rain storm just at the end of ripening lodged and spoiled a lot of it.
The black barley, with a slightly longer season, did well. A good reason to grow many kinds of things!
Just after the flowers are the tomatoes. I’m growing them on tall trellises this year.
Then there are beds filled with bush beans, and low trellises planted with melons, doubleclick cupcake blush cosmos and Oklahoma pink zinnias. The pink flowers in the front are an experimental planting of spring buckwheat.
The bush beans are doing very well – too well! Left to right – Red Swan, Royalty Purple Pod, Dragon Tongue, Beurre De Rocquencourt, Maxibel French bean, and Roma beans.
I didn’t mean to plant so many, but i got a package of seeds to try from a new seed company – Kitchen Garden Seeds. They have a great selection of heirloom seeds (all my favorites), and their seed packets are generously filled and have a very good germination rate.
Hobbes was in the garden with me this morning! Here are beds of ground cherries, sunberries, tomatillos, and eggplants, planted with yellow canary zinnias and holy basil. Behind them is a row of cardoon, planted with Zinderella Peach zinnias, the amaranth trial behind, and in the very back a border of lemonade sunflowers-
They are fuzzy like the teddy bear sunflowers, but they are tall.
The peppers are prolific this year. Many of the hot peppers overwintered, and were simply trimmed back and mulched.
On the other side are the millet trials – just a few small test plots. I am saving back half the seeds to try a fall planting. The varieties are Dragon Claw, Mochi Awan, and Hell’s Canyon. Beyond is a test plot of a sorghum from Adaptive Seeds. The row beyond is Valencia peanuts and Candystick zinnias (LOVE these!).
Then the first planting of sweet corn. This picture is old. It’s tasselling now.
Now there are the gourd tunnels, planted with edible luffa, Cucuzzi gourds, bitter melon and jelly melons.
The Queen Lime zinnias are planted here, near the galaxies of flowering dill above the celery, parsley, and celeriac left from winter.
Across the path are the cucumbers, Bush Pickle from Kitchen Garden Seeds, planted on low trellises with Bloody Mary nasturtiums, bright lights cosmos, Rubenza cosmos, and Tithonia.
Next is a bed of summer squash – Benning’s Green Tint patty pan squash, Costata Romanesco zucchini, and yellow crookneck squash, with State Fair zinnias.
Almost the very back has winter vegetables – kale, collards, and broccoli still growing!
Not pictured, but after this is a second planting of sweet corn, pole beans, beets, parsnips, cow peas, goji berries and sunflowers.
Would you believe me that this is only half the garden? The other half is still in progress – i have planted there watermelon, pigeon peas, winged beans, cassava, pumpkins, Chinese noodle beans, okra, sesame, more corn, sweet potatoes, malabar spinach, molokhia, and Roselle.
As Rose said when she came to find me the other day as i was weeding, “This is a crazy garden. “
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 
How lovely! Costata Romanesco zucchini are my favorite kind.
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Me too! I’ve tried other ones and like it best.
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just wow! I know that your gardens are a lot of work, but what a dream to be able to grow so much food!
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I love having so much fresh food availible. It’s so worth the sweat and muscle
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I can’t imagine. 🙂
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Thank you for sharing, gives the rest of us hope and goals!
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Lol, the quarantine really helped me find the time for it!
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Its our Autumn now & looking at your garden just warms my soul. Wow all your hard work looks just magnificent. You look so happy & relaxed sitting amongst part of your garden. Its so great that you have the photos to look back on all your hard yakka. Thanks for being the amazing inspiring person that you are. Gotta love the cats part in it as well. haha. Have a wonderful ever prosperous rest of the week. (:
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The autumn garden is my favorite one here, because we have so many delicious greens that grow then! I know you’ve got peas growing, do you do radishes or Asian greens?
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I have a few radishes, just planted strawberries & rhubarb. Our challenge is not enough rainfall so have been looking into tanks for a while now. Hopefully before spring. 🌼
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Ah i see! We have a dry fall as well, but we have karst topography, so lots of underground water, and we have a well, so i can irrigate.
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Thank you for sharing your garden. It is top notch magnificant!
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Thank you Raven!
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So wonderful to see your joy expressed in so many flowers, herbs , grains and veggies. Quite a luxury to create this along with all your hard work👍🌈
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Your garden is lovely, reminding me of my homestead garden of earlier days. What part of Florida are you in? It must be lovely to be able to leave peppers and dahlias and other things in the ground and know they will return. You grow quite a wide variety. Do you eat it all, or do a farmers market? I’ve grown buckwheat and other grains, but didn’t know there was a pink flowering buckwheat. Will have to look for that one as the bees love buckwheat, and I think it’s the easiest to harvest. Used to grow and make sorghum, too but now I live too far north. Thanks for sharing your garden. Happy growing.
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I’m in north central Florida, near Gaineville. The pink buckwheat was from Baker Creek heirloom seeds. The peppers don’t usually overwinter, so it was a nice surprise to see them coming back! Sadly, dahlias don’t like the harsh summer here. The late summer is like winter up north, where nothing likes to grow.
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Oh my; too many adjectives! But they work. It really is refined.
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WOW!
Love the trellises and the bush beans!
😍🍃
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