Farm Tour 2024

Now that planting is done, I’m excited to take you on a little photo tour of the garden so you can see what it looks like here on our less than 1/4 acre urban homestead. You can read more of the story down below but for now, just enjoy these lovely pictures.

These are the original 4 beds (and then immediately 2 more) we put in as soon as we moved into our house. The first is an herb garden which I cut out of this picture because I have 6 foot herbs you can’t see through. The next 4 beds are where I’m experimenting this year with a close planting model of intermixing various plants for high yields in small spaces. So far I am loving it. The 6th bed is snap dragons for the cut flower farm.

Just after the top 6 beds, the garden doubles in width. This is where we started adding plants and size quickly in 2020. Here is our well-established rhubarb and raspberry patches. Also weeds because #farmlife.

This is our strawberry patch. We are always working to get more and more plants to fill all of our strawberry dreams. This starts to go slightly down a slope and I put these in by myself so I foraged some old wood from our woods (one is an old clothesline post) and just made the soil less likely to erode. This is one area we would do very differently in the future.

I don’t believe in only sharing the highlight reel. This is horseradish and blueberry patch. The deer were very unkind to our blueberries several years in a row and the patch has really suffered for it. We’ve tried several things but we are now fighting a thistle infestation. We took time to weed it together last night (post photo) and it looks so much better. But it’s frustrating and uphill work. I really want to cover this with a silage tarp and start over. We will see.

Continuing down the slope, at the end of the raspberry patch we have what we’re called the 1/2 garden bed since it’s half the size of our other beds and to help everyone, I number the beds. This is situated right between our raspberry and elderberry patches.

Just past the elderberries, we put in 4 new beds. This area receives less sun light but we went for it on the planting and are trimming trees branches to help us get more sun. The bottom two boxes have seeds of squashes, pumpkins, melons, and sunflowers. Already 3 Big Max pumpkins have sprouted. We’re excited to see what else comes up!

Then you’ll notice the area just behind it that’s covered in a silage tarp. To put these beds in, we worked a lot of hours pulling weeds, wild raspberries, and many vining plants by hand. When we ran out of wood scraps to build boxes, it was where we had weeded to. We decided to call it and cover the rest in silage tarp for next year maybe or whenever we get to it.

Beds #7-11 also don’t have boards around them but the soil is *chef’s kiss* so there is all sorts of stuff planted down here, including the elephant garlic that has been in Farmer Matt’s family for a long time, making its annual appearance on the homestead. (P.S. It’s garlic scape harvesting time)

These beds are #12-14, which maybe we’ll have to rename but for now, this is it. The idea was to have squashes be able to run out of these beds. But we also have a pretty serious deer issue so last year, they just destroyed the squashes and sweet potatoes. This year, they are staying away but the bunnies have been greedy. Farm Dog hasn’t caught any rabbits yet but he brought us a ground hog tonight. These beds have potatoes, flowers, sweet potatoes, squashes – really whatever we stuck in here at the end of planting.

We even plant potatoes between the boxes down here because there is a lot of space we left for trees that the deer ended up ruining. So we have one apple tree that had blossoms this year. We’ll see what happens.

So that’s our garden. We really like it and we spend a lot of time in it and on it.

Here’s a little back story on our garden and some of my thoughts on doing what you can with what you have where you’re at.

In March 2019 we moved into our house and one of the first things we decided to do was to put in 4 raised garden beds. After planting what we wanted, we immediately decided we needed 6 beds. We added two more and never put boards on them. (They are still like this ha)

In 2020 when life was a different pace, we decided that instead of our original expansion plan of neat and orderly and a little at a time that we would just take our garden area all the way down the yard to our woods. We ordered trees and bushes and planted and added as quickly as we could with the materials we had on hand.

We live on just shy of an acre, which is a very long and skinny piece of property. It’s about half wooded and the other half is our yard. All of our garden is on less than 1/4 acre.

We are always adding new beds. This year, 4 full-size and 1 half-size bed went in. And covered up the final corner for weed eradication. It could fit 4-5 more beds which we may tackle next year.

I take time to say this because, it is very much a work in progress. A work in progress we love. A work in progress we enjoy. But we have not arrived and we do not have everything done exactly the way we want.

But we are using what we have in the space we have to do what we want to do.

Which is grow yummy food and gorgeous flowers.