How Our Garden Grows

Summer is here and blogging is back! We have more time and more to talk about. Winter is our favorite season and we long for the days when we can fill it with making maple syrup and knitting but currently it is a very busy time for work making it hard to find time for artisan pursuits and even harder to find time to write about them.


As you may remember from last year we put a garden into our backyard and revived the garden out front. We were pleased this spring to see that the chives came back, at least tripling in size from last year and two lavender plants also came back. Earlier this summer Molly and I worked in the herb garden after visiting a horticultural society sale. I worked in the garden planting two more lavender plants as well as two chive plants while she planted pots of basil and rosemary. Everything looks wonderful!

Last weekend we worked in our veggie garden out back. Last year our garden was practically a disaster. We planted tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. The cukes were all that survived the whole season and gave us veggies. This year we decided to rent a tiller from Home Depot to get the soil really nice and fluffy, incorporating some more fertilizer.

We got the same variety of cucumbers and planted 4 plants instead of three. We cheated and bought 3 big healthy tomatoes plants that already have baby tomatoes on them. Hopefully it will increase our success.

We also planted 4 varieties of peppers. In addition to those veggies we added one zucchini and one yellow squash plant. We still had room so Dave got adventurous and turned one corner of the garden into a teeny strawberry patch! It is so cute.

We also planted a watermelon plant where our horseradish failed last year.

Perhaps the watermelon will have more success but our hopes aren’t very high for the strawberries or watermelon – that is more of an experiment. Everything looks great and we can’t wait to see how the herbs, veggies, berries, and melon turn out!

UPDATE: Since this post was written last week, the strawberry plants had an untimely demise: big fat squirrels dug up all the plants and ate every single leaf. RIP strawberry patch. Everything else is looking healthy though!