What we are growing in our garden

After spend a lot of last spring and summer creating the ideal back garden for our household, this year we just have to maintain it really! There are a few small tasks that we want to do this year, primarily around taming our blackberry bush and possibly getting rid of a stump or two. However, our main thing this year is just enjoying what we created last year. We have moved our little vegetable patch into a spot that gets slightly more light and started checking on our blooms in our garden.

Flowers

When it comes to flowers, we’ve actually never added flowers to our home. They were just there as apart of our house. We’ve got a few different spots with roses in our back yard, which always need cutting back a bit in the spring before they bloom. These roses always look beautiful and smell fantastic – sometimes we pick one or two to place indoors in vases. They are deep red and have grown so tall on the trellis that we placed into the ground last year. Peony flowers are growing in a little bush by our back shed, which are also in a deep red. At the very end of our garden, we have some yellow flowers, I am not sure which ones, that grow where the tulips leave at the end of spring. They are in full bloom at the moment, but very delicate!

Vegetable, Fruit and Herbs

Last year, we grew a very successful garden of beets, beans, and tomatoes as well as tons of spring onions. We let each of our children pick out a vegetable and then they all picked and prepped their veggies! This year, we have got our garden growing cherry tomatoes – which Amelia chose as she really wanted them, snap peas picked by Robin, and red hot chili peppers picked by Kai. I also picked out some regular bell peppers and some purple beans to try out, as these purple French beans just look like they’d be a fun addition to the dinner table. I debated doing some carrots as well, but I feel like I am too impatient to pull them out of the ground at the right time! We do have some herbs in our back yard; a mint plant that grows back every year. There is literally no seemingly way to kill mint, so if you like mint, do plant it. There is also a pot of parsley, as we use a lot of parsley too. When it comes to fruit, we have a giant blackberry bush, that is quite the challenge, but as we all love it so much we are just pruning it this year. Dann is looking to get a fruit tree though!

Pond Plants

We do have a small pond-type creation with a few little fish hanging about inside. This pond was something that Dann really wanted to create last year! Thankfully, all of the fish and plants survived it seems. There are lily pads sticking out of the water, along with a bunch of little leaves from another plant that I cannot quite remember the name of. There are currently two white stick-like stems coming off of that plant, which had bloomed in late summer last year, and we are debating cutting back to see if it needs that. We are hoping these will bloom and grow throughout the spring and summer once again.

Growing up, my grandmother had a massive garden that was literally eight times the area of our entire backyard. I spent a lot of time picking green beans, tomatoes, and lettuce from her yard, so it’s fantastic to have a little bit of flowers and edible plants of our own.

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