As spring is approaching (or here), I am excited to share my garden pictures. If you’ve ever grown a garden, then I know you understand my excitement for what seems like weeds popping up in the dirt!
In the spot we usually grow tomatoes, I started out with peas and spinach. I have had to replant from one of the pea packets as nothing grew from the first round of planting. We’ll see if anything grows this second time. If not, then those seeds will go to the trash as they are no longer viable. (Or I’ll just throw in the ground somewhere and see if ANY of them grow)
In front of the peas, I have two types of spinach planted. Of the first round planted, about 7 have popped up. I sowed a second planting in between the rows of the first planting. (First and second plantings were about 3 weeks apart). I am beginning to get an idea of just how much I may have to plant to be able to actually get a salad from these plants…I may need to turn the WHOLE backyard into a salad garden in order to grow enough. In the photo below, the spinach are the things that look like blades of grass (bottom left corner and middle left). There are some weeds in there too that are getting plucked out as they are big enough to actually grasp.
As I walk around the side of the house, we have a couple of blueberry bushes, and rhubarb plants. I harvested 2 lbs. of rhubarb yesterday!! Any ideas on how to use so much rhubarb? I can only do so much jam, sauce or pies. (I still have strawberry rhubarb jam leftover from last year)
Across from the blueberries is a raspberry patch. These are coming along nicely. They are everbearing raspberries, which means we get a spring/early summer harvest and then a fall harvest. I learned that last year and was pleasantly surprised with our large fall harvest!
As I circle the backyard, next up in ‘the mound’ where I have strawberries planted. Because this area gets quite a bit of shade, I chose to grow alpine strawberries here. I won’t get a big harvest from these, but they’re cute and a good use of this space. I’m hoping that over the coming years, these may expand out and fill in a bit more.
Here is the Mignonette strawberry plant from last year that has new growth this spring. The second picture is the two Mignonette plants I planted this spring. There’s a pretty considerable size difference between the plants from one year to the next.
On to the actual garden plot, my radishes are coming up well. My beets are barely visible (I’m pointing to what has come up) and there’s more spinach. Because the beets and spinach haven’t done so great, I did a second planting of both of those about 3 weeks after the first planting. I’m hoping I’ll start seeing that second planting in a couple more weeks and that the first planting continues to get bigger!
And finally, rounding out the backyard, we have flowers coming in on the honeyberry (haskap) bushes! These are an interesting early berry that when ripe, looks like an elongated blueberry.
The bees are starting to come out so having flowers for them to pollinate is fantastic. My husband put out his Mason bees and I’ve seen some bumble bees buzzing around.
I have also planted potatoes, kale and carrots in the garden. But nothing is showing yet, so I won’t bore you with pictures of dirt.
It’s exciting to see things blossom and grow in the spring and quite fun to see what works in our garden and what doesn’t.
My goal for my 2024 garden is 100 lbs. harvested from the back yard.
Goal status: 2 of 100 lbs.