And I want to see your garden too…

I will show you my garden and I hope that you will show me yours, even if it is a gorgeous solitary pot on the balcony of your condo… or a grand allotment by the sea or a corner by the shed,  a patch out the front by the road..a space cleared out in the forest or at your mothers place.. I would love you to show me your garden too..

Here are a few corners of my garden.  You know that we work towards Free Days, where the farm feeds the farm. So we grow a lot of vegetables, for us and the animals. 

Later we will be putting  pumpkin plants for the cows winter feed into the flower gardens. The flower gardens are huge and heaving with flowers for the bees at this time of year. Later the plants die back a bit and in go the pumpkins and they weave themselves along the flower beds protecting the plants roots from the heat. This is the Wendy house where we store all the wood. We  heat with a wood stove during the winter(no central heating)  and anyone who has a tree come down calls us and we collect the wood.  We have never had to cut down a tree to heat ourselves. 

This is the entrance to Stalkers garden. This garden  is about 20 foot by 30 foot and would fit nicely into a small backyard. All the beds are raised and mowed in between.  And it has an area where I can sit with a cup of tea. This is Stalkers Garden from another angle.  Not my favourite shot but you get the idea. This entire fence will eventually be covered in grape vine. So it will be like a walled garden.

Here is the Frog Garden. This has a small pond underneath the boardwalk which keeps the soil moist. It is already full of very merry frogs. It is fed with rain water from the guttering on the Wendy House. The theory is that the garden is self watering by storing its own rainwater.  The pond watering the roots from below. And it works. The frogs keep the water clean.  It is a small garden about 18 foot by 10 foot ( I am terrible at gauging these things) so would fit easily into a small back yard of a working person who does not have a lot of time to water or who has water restrictions.  This is a raised bed too. 

The frog garden has a wall of yellow blossom clover for shelter which is a great favourite of the bees. Wind is a wicked problem out here on the prairie so shelter is a consideration. 

This is more yellow blossom clover in the bee garden. Because of the risk of contamination to the bees from the surrounding GM crops I plant organic yellow blossom clover and organic buckwheat in big wild plantings for the bees.  Also the fields have a lot of white and red clover in there.  Hopefully the bees go for the good flowers first.

Is it me or is every single one of these shots a little bit wonky. My eye has to have everything straight or it gets upset… I must have been having a crooked day yesterday. 

I saw no queen cells as I went through the hives yesterday. So far so good. I am not afraid of being stung. So I do not have a suit. This is the sum total of my bee keeping gear. I am more concerned about the million eyes watching me work.  I just feel so Judged!

Here is one of the onion beds. With the potatoes in the background. They are mostly out of the shot and there are ten baby blueberry bushes in between.

The potatoes should be good this year as the spring has been long and cool. Potatoes like cool feet. You know that I am working towards growing enough produce to store as a winters supply.   So we can live off the land for an entire year. That is a lot of onions and potatoes Let alone all the rest!  Even though I grow more and more each year I have not been able to grow enough. I can see why the pioneers ate a lot of beans!

There are two more big open gardens and they look a bit like this. The plants are quite small  and not terribly photogenic.  You will note the potatoes in the back of this shot too, we are looking back. There is still plenty of room for successive plantings. Our animals help us  make a lot of compost and I have a large pile of straw from the winter barn as well, so all the soil has compost dug into it, then straw or compost on top.

Good morning. That was a little wander about a few of the Kitchen’s Garden gardens. We walked down roughly half of the South side from West to East.   Actually the bees should have come first but never mind. As you can imagine there is more.  We can look at them another day.  Plus the flower beds have more vegetables popped into corners and the herb garden close to the kitchen door is already on the verge of  being out of control!  So I need to start drying herbs already. The first one is the parsley. I just pick and pop it whole into a paper bag and store it in the back of the fridge for a few months. Then transfer the dried leaves into a jar. It  is so easy it is silly!!

I hope you all have a fabulous day in the garden, or at work, in the kitchen or at your desk, just pottering about making your life worthwhile.  That is what I will be doing. Remember life is a journey. No pressure to get to the finish line!  Just Live it. Eyes wide open!

celi