Gardening is a big part of my job on the homestead. We try our best to grow as much of our own food as possible. With this goal in mind, we've adopted various strategies to make our life easier. Perennial food is are essential for our success and our ultimate goal is to develop a permaculture food garden.

I haven't had a chance to share much of our gardens with you (we still have 5FT snow drifts in the garden), so I thought I would share some of the more interesting things we've been working on. Spring is a great time to share garden ideas don't you think?

The Main Garden

The main garden comprises of raised beds and containers. It is surrounded by a fence that has wire around it, to keep rabbits and other wildlife out. I really enjoying growing food in raised beds. I think as we get older we'll appreciate it even more.

This garden is what one would call a polyculture design. This basically means that instead of planting a whole bed of carrots, we mix things up creating crop diversity. Each bed contains a variety of different plants. With the carrots I'll plant some lettuce early in the season and when that's done something else such as peas will go in. I might tuck some onions around the edges of the bed and might intersperse some tomato plants with the carrots as well.

There's always some flowers growing in each bed as well. Nasturtiums are nice because you can grow them on a trellis to add shade or let them trail over the edges of the beds.

Most of the features: garden frames, trellises, garden stakes etc are made from sticks, twigs and logs. It's all stuff from the woods surrounding the house.

Highlights of The Main Garden

• Containers growing perennial mint, herbs & horseradish which are all great at repelling bad insects
• Barrels for potatoes (potato bugs have never been an issue).
• Flowers such as nasturtiums and borage help attract pollinators and make the garden colourful (plus they are edible)
• Sunflowers can be used as a trellis for cucumbers
• Grape vines can create a nice shade wall if you have too much sun
• Sticks/logs and twigs are a fun way to create dimension in the garden. Grow things upwards!
• Polyculture planting helps create a more natural and healthy environment
• Cold frames to get an early start on growing
• Bug netting where needed to create physical barriers rather than chemical ones.

The Second Garden

The second garden is "in ground" and we've really just started developing this area. We have heavy clay soil which has been challenging to amend. Last year I planted thing like squash, beans. pumpkins and a huge patch of sunflowers. It did "ok" but wasn't the quality of crop I am used to.

There are some fruit trees planted around this garden as well. I am hoping to build it up to more of a lush garden with paths. At the moment it looks like a barren in ground garden surrounded by lawn. I am so eager to get planting this spring and start transforming this!

We were able to amend some of the garden beds over the summer and have planted hard neck garlic in these patches. I am eager to see how it does. Last spring we had non stop rain for a month and our garlic was flooded. The ground was a swampy, soupy mess and the crop was a failure. Fortunately we like to plant in various areas to increase our odds of success. We still ended up with plenty of garlic.

We made some bean teepees which worked out nicely. We mulched heavily with straw to try to fight off the weeds. It's been a struggle.

This trellis was built using material scrounged up in the woods. I did this so that the grape vine from the main garden can continue across to the new garden. It was still being constructed in this photo. It's not pretty but it's sturdy and won't be visible beneath the canopy of vines. We'll plant more grapes as well to try and tie the two gardens together over time.

We have an herb spiral. When we pick rocks from the field, they go here. We haven't planted in it yet so I am excited to get this filled with herbs. The spiral basically creates a bunch of micro climates. Some areas will be more shaded, others get more sun, some get more water, other areas less. It's a neat way to grow herbs with varying needs all in one location.

The Back Field

The back field has also been used for cover crops. We had a disastrous (and back breaking) potato & corn growing effort two years ago that made me want to abandon the idea of growing here entirely. This paired with the deer flies made the whole project miserable from beginning to end. Not one to give up, we tried garlic the year after and that was a bit disappointing but better than potatoes.

Since then we've been growing buckwheat as a cover crop and tilling everything in to help amend the soil. Things were looking much better in the autumn so we planted over a hundred raspberry plants (suckers) that came from an investment of nine raspberry plants a few years earlier. We heavily mulched them with straw and crossed our fingers. I am really eager to see how they did over winter.

We are planning to propagate blackberries in the spring and plant a row of those as well. We will also start a new rhubarb, horseradish & Jerusalem artichoke patch back here. Eventually it should be filled with perennial plants.

Flower gardens & More

In addition to this, there are flower gardens, herb patches, rose bushes, lavender patches and all kinds of other things growing. A lot of the flowers we grow are also useful for making skincare, soap and even culinary items.

We have a grove of young apple trees that we hope will survive and thrive (fruit trees are something I have very little experience with).

I grow herbs in the garden boxes on our porch, and basically shove food all over the place. Some people find this odd but it works well for us.

One day we'll have ourselves a food forest, I just have to remember to be patient. We have a lot of ground to cover and there's just the two of us to do it all. Bit by bit we are replacing lawn with plants.

You might also like reading this series on Seeds!

Happy Gardening! I would love to hear about what you have planned this year!

---

[@walkerland ]
Building a greener, more beautiful world one seed at a time.
Homesteading | Gardening | Frugal Living | Preserving Food| From Scratch Cooking|

You can also find me at: walkerland.ca

Photo copyright: @walkerland