A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other people’s pictures and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all find unique ways to save, show off our chickens and have a rock star gardens. Keep them coming!
Hey friends and fellow readers! Liz from Indiana here with a garden to share with you all. My spouse and I bought our first house in a rural suburb in 2017. One of our requirements was space for a garden, and I’ve got about 475 square feet of growing space here now.
I grew up with a large garden, but strangely enough, it wasn’t until I moved out that I started really getting interested in managing my own veggie patch. I tried to grow a few things in pots on apartment balconies, and even got some raised beds put in at our last rental, but this has been so much more rewarding, not to mention productive! I love starting my day by going out to the garden and seeing what’s new since yesterday.
Think of this series of photos as Garden In Progress – I wanted to show that not every garden is going to be picture perfect. There’s a lot of good stuff growing, but lots of projects and tasks still to do. I mean, is any garden really ever finished? I’m pretty pleased with where my garden is right now though, considering this was all grassy yard last April!
Here’s what I’ve got planted: 4 kinds of green beans (long beans, pole beans, and 2 varieties of bush beans), carrots, spinach, bok choy, tatsoi, 3 kinds of lettuce, swiss chard, broccoli, herbs, bell peppers, 1 jalapeno plant, cocozelle summer squash, cucumbers, sugar snap peas, strawberries, 3 kinds of tomatoes (cherry, paste, and pink brandywine), shallots, asparagus, rhubarb, corn, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, and red and purple potatoes. It’s a lot for just two people, but part of the fun of having a garden for me is sharing it with friends and family, which I try to do as often as I can.
The view from the other corner of the garden. We just installed the third bed this year so I could add in some crops that needed more space. I’m trying out the three sisters planting for the first time with Glass Gem popcorn, cranberry beans, and jack-o-lantern pumpkins.
I’m waiting for the corn to get a bit taller before I put in the beans. Another new thing for me this year is potato trenches. My parents were visiting the other day and they’d never heard of the technique, so I’m eager to see if it yields more than the usual method of “stick ’em in the ground and wait.”
I tried starting plants from seed, and I think the cold interfered with their growth quite a lot, even inside the house. I successfully grew herbs, tomatoes, and peppers from starts last year, but this year nearly everything died after I planted it, or was so small that I’m not sure they’re going to yield before frost hits.
We had a very cold, wet spring, so gardens got a late start around here. It also got hot very quickly, and then stopped raining for nearly a month, so the weather’s been a little wacky. I supplemented with some starts from a local nursery – broccoli, bell peppers, cherry and paste tomatoes.
I try to garden pretty frugally using what I already have available. Here’s green beans growing against the chain link fence, and I’ve got sugar snap peas that are growing on the other end of the fence. Ready-made trellis! You can also see my attempt at a compost pile on the other side of the fence.
Compost is something I’m still figuring out. Haven’t quite gotten the formula down yet, so I’ve got 3 piles in various places around our property in various states of decomposition. Last year I put way too much green grass clippings on the pile and they didn’t break down properly – it just got slimy and smelly.
The strawberry bed – Last year it grew pumpkins because all the roots I planted did absolutely nothing. I didn’t get a single plant out of about 40 crowns – grr! What a waste of growing time, money, and garden space. I suspect it was a lack of water. The pumpkins did just fine though, and their seeds were delicious. This year I bit the bullet and bought 8 strawberry plants and 10 more crowns.
The crowns haven’t done squat yet, but the plants are doing really well. They’ve put out a bunch of runners and a few blossoms a couple weeks after being planted. Most of my netting was used to keep rabbits from eating all my pea shoots, and I didn’t quite have enough left over to cover the strawberry bed. I’ve got more netting, but haven’t installed it yet. The hoops are some flexible pipe that was left over from putting in a new water main, and the netting that’s there is held down by old boards and some scavenged bricks.
Some perennial herbs fighting the grass. We didn’t till this entire row last year, just parts of it, so I’m fighting off a nasty grass invasion now. I’m planning on moving these next to the asparagus and surrounding all my perennials with a brick border to help fight the grass from creeping in (we dumpster-dove for the bricks).
Eventually I’d like to put down weed barrier and mulch between all the rows, but the garden budget is already exhausted for this year. I also need to run a few more irrigation hoses so I don’t have to spend 2 hours watering the whole dang garden.
Peppers surrounded by volunteer flowers. If you’re ever considering planting forget-me-nots, don’t plant them in the vegetable garden. Just….don’t. You’ll never get rid of them. Pick a place in a flower bed where they can scatter their seeds to their little hearts’ content. At least they’re good for the bees. I see a few buzzing around pretty much every day. I suspect a neighbor a few houses down has a hive.
Another example of using what’s available – the sticks are from trees that we had to cut out of the fence, and the posts are from what used to be a horseshoe throwing pit backstop. Since neither my spouse or myself have any interest in horseshoes, he knocked out the boards with a sledgehammer (borrowed from a very kind and friendly neighbor who saw us struggling with a regular household hammer and brought his much more useful tool right over), and we put in the branch trellises.
I need to tie the cucumbers onto the sticks so they’ll actually start climbing them. This bed also looks about half weeded. My excuse is that I had more pressing chores to do, like eat sugar snap peas straight off the vine.
The three sisters garden with pumpkins growing in between 2 patches of corn, plus some flowers growing at the far end. The planks are from the old horseshoe backstops, and I have or plan on having a little walkway like this across each bed.
I call this Salad Row, probably the most successful part of the garden besides the sugar snap peas. It has all the salad greens growing in the space that’s closest to the house for easy harvest. We’ve had an unusually hot streak in June, so things are starting to bolt now.
The bok choy and tatsoi are being eaten by some kind of bugs, but I’m leaving them for now as a sacrifice crop. Hopefully that’ll keep the pests out of the good stuff for a while longer. I’ll plant bush beans here once the lettuces and the broccoli are gone. I also need to clean up the edges pretty badly – the grass is creeping in by leaps and bounds.
My garden’s never going to be featured in a magazine, or perfectly weeded, or even good-looking sometimes, but it’s doing its job: growing food. There’s nothing quite as tasty as a bowl of sugar snap peas or a salad that was picked an hour before we ate it. I’ve got a lot to do still: finish installing drip hoses, mulch everything with dried grass clippings (way cheaper than buying straw, and I can’t keep piling it on the compost anyway), clean up the bed edges, plant dry beans, plan a fall garden, turn the compost piles a few more times, build the raised bed for the blueberry bushes my mom bought me as a delayed Christmas present…but honestly, I’d rather doing this than just about anything else. I love my garden, and I love hearing about yours too.
~Liz
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Mama Cook says
Liz! Great job! “My garden’s never going to be featured in a magazine…” Well, it was just featured on a very popular blog!!!. I love how you are using what you have and continuing to grow your own food. One thought for free mulch is wood chips! It is the feature of the Back to Eden style of gardening and this time of year you can usually get them free from a local tree service. You want the chips with green in it, not play chips or bark. It will prevent weeds, nourish your soil, reduce your water needs, and beautify all at the same time! Thanks for sharing!
Carrie says
I love using wood chips in my garden beds! I rarely have to water and it keeps the weeds at bay!
Heidi P says
I love your garden. I too will never have a picture perfect garden:)
A word of warning about getting free bark chips. I did this two years ago and it was awesome until I realized the chips were from diseased trees and carried lots of bugs into my garden. Very sad. That years garden didn’t do well at all because it was a continual bug and disease war like I’d never seen before.
Carrie says
I’ve been getting free wood chips the last five years and never had a problem. It takes a long time to shovel a truck load into my chicken run, flower beds and veggie garden. I like to use the partially composted chips for the garden. I hate that you had a bad experience because I recommend that method to everyone!
Straw also works well but you have to pay for it. 🙂
I will never not mulch a garden again. My first big garden 6 years ago I had so many weeds and had to turn the sprinkler on everyday to water. So much energy and water (and money) wasted! My boyfriend came across the Back to Eden garden and we’ve never turned back.
Liz says
Thanks for the encouragement, everyone! It’s nice to know there’s lots of people who are more than willing to share their knowledge and pass it on to newer gardeners like me!
We have several tree-trimming companies and a veneer manufacturer here in our relatively small town, and it’s my plan to call up a few of them and see if I can get some free wood chips. My idea was to lay down newspaper and cardboard, then cover that with weed barrier, then cover THAT with wood chips. We’ve got a really nasty grass/plant – either whitherwill or buffalo grass – that sends runners out, sometimes underground, up to a foot in all directions. It’s growing on the edges of about a third of the garden, so I really really want to get that under control. I used grass clippings in the actual beds last year and think I’ll do the same for this year, although it might lead to some grass seeds getting in the beds.
Emily E. says
I’ve used grass clippings as mulch in both my flower borders and in my veggie gardens and love it! It’s free and does an excellent job keeping the beds moist underneath and it dries to a nice tan so I think it looks nice as well. One year I did get a giant load of trimmings from the tree trimmers that come around annually to trim around the power lines and it worked great. The pieces are generally much larger than typical mulch but the plus side is that they don’t break down as quickly. I also use straw and have used rotted hay very thickly and it works great too. I love that you’re using what you have and I think your gardens look great!
suzanne says
Your garden is perfect. Thank you for sharing with all of us.
Liz says
Thank you!
Carol says
I love your use of recycled materials! and the variety of your crops. Your three sisters plot is inspirational. I’m really impressed that you’ve achieved so much in the first year in your new home.
Liz says
Thanks! It’s actually our second summer here – we bought the house in April of 2017. I put seeds in the ground before we had all our boxes unpacked 😉
Andrea says
You are doing it, Liz! Spend time and effort in enriching the soil and keep scavenging for materials to ‘build’ the garden. Love your spirit! Keep on digging!
Liz says
Thank you for the encouragement! I love tooling around in the dirt!
Gee says
Great garden, Liz! As long as you enjoy the process, it’s a success no matter how much of what you get out of it in a given year. Plus it gives young marriages something to argue about. 🙂
When I first started gardening, I didn’t have any budget for garden stuff, so I, too, used what we had or could scrounge from family or neighbors. We couldn’t put up fancy fences or row covers, etc. But gardeners as a rule are generous people, so I was given many types of perennials over the years to start my own beds. My favorite was strawberries. They came with instructions (pick off all the flowers the first year, so the energy goes into growing the plants and sending out runners. I only cheated once) and plant food (Dig a trench and put one of these dead fish under each plant because that’s how the “Indians” did it! Does your hubby like to fish?) The strawberries were huge and sweet as candy. Best ones I ever grew.
Liz says
Thank you! I’m excited to share some of my strawberry runners with my family once they get going – I know at least one of them will appreciate some free strawberry plants!
Question for you – the plants (not the crowns) that I have are ever-bearing – should I pick off all the flowers this year, or just the first flush? (I have also cheated and left one plant to bear some fruit). And what do I do with all the runners? It seems like every plant is sending out half a dozen or more! I cut them back to just one runner per plant because they started sending out runners only a couple weeks after I planted them. I figured removing most of the runners would give the plants more time to get established.
Does hubby like to fish? Yes, but we haven’t gone yet this year!
Emily E. says
Thank you so much for sharing your garden!!! I love that you focus on function and yield. Real gardens have weeds! I would love to see your garden in a few years. Maybe Mavis can do a follow up so we can see all your progress! Your veggies look robust and healthy. Do you grow other flowers as well? Very nice! Have fun!
Liz says
Thank you! I feel like any garden that doesn’t have full-time employees is going to have a few weeds at least 😉 As for other flowers, there’s a few perennials that came with the house and a lovely lilac bush that is unfortunately shaded by our large maple tree out front. I’d love to put in some more perennials – day lilies, lavender, and some kind of flowering vine, but haven’t found the opportunity yet.
Diana says
Great Job! Instead of using a weed blocking fabric, use newspapers, cardboard and old pieces of carpet. They keep the weeds at bay, allow the water to go through and can be covered up with your grass clippings. I use all three in my garden and it works wonderfully. As mentioned above, I also use wood chips. Mine end up sitting for a long while before they’re used, so they’re a beautiful compost material by the time I spread them. You may try contacting a local tree company or two to see if they may have extra that they need to dump and can’t sell (it’s not always usual, but you never know).
Keep up the good work!
Liz says
Thanks for the advice and encouragement! It’s my plan to call some local tree companies and do just that – there’s a surprising number of tree trimming companies in our small town.
Lisa Millar says
Love your garden! You’ve done so much and have so much on the go! Very exciting.
Its great seeing people use what they have at hand to develop their gardens – we do similar things in our garden.
Hopefully you will find some local free mulch which will cut down on your weeds. I use pine needles on my strawberries gathered from the local plantations. Strawberries like their soil a bit more acidic!
Have fun – really enjoyed reading about your garden adventure!
Liz says
Thank you! I didn’t realize that strawberries like a more acidic soil. I’ve got some blueberry fertilizer that I can give them this year. Hmm, I wonder if I can talk my neighbors down the road into letting me rake their pine needles….
Tracy says
You just keep going, you’re doing fine. I think your garden looks great! My only comment is wow, it looks so dry! Water, water, water! I have irrigation and it still seems like all I do some days.
Diana says
I’m noticing the lack of blogging over the past two days, and hoping all is going to be okay with Lucy. Thinking of you all.
Mim says
Very worried about your family. Hoping Lucy is okay. Sending good wishes.
Rynda says
Noticed you haven’t posted yet today. Thinking about Lucy and your family. Sending you peace.
LaToya says
I was thinking the same thing ….. and kept coming to see if there was a Lucy update. Hope the little bebe is ok.
E in Upstate NY says
Liz,
Love your garden story. The progress you have made in just two growing seasons is wonderful. When looking for cardboard, suggest contacting the local dialysis center. The supplies for home dialysis is shipped in the thickest boxes I’ve ever seen. Used them in my raised gardens, including going up the sides. Those beds have not been invaded with other non-veggie roots.
Last year, I found some small hula hoops at the dollar store. Think it was 3 for 2 dollars. I took them apart, they were tubes connected with a wood core and a staple. They became my curved structure for holding fabric to cover my strawberries.
The neighborhood has people who actively feed the squirrels, causing us to be overrun with them. They LOVE strawberries. So far this year, have only harvested ONE berry due to rodent teeth marks in the rest.