Our fall planted garlic was ready to be harvested yesterday. One of our Hens just had to check it out. Soon enough it will be time to plant again. 

Corn in the three sisters bed. 

Soybeans or Edamame in the three sisters bed. 

Squash in the three sisters bed. 

Cabbage after the rain. 

Heads of broccoli are starting to form. 

Pole beans doing what they do best, climbing. 

Ground Cherries. 

Onions grown from seed. 

Brussel Sprouts. 

The hummingbirds and bees are head over heels for these, and all of my other, petunias. 

Echinecea starting to bloom with the lilies. 

The Big Picture.

We could not get the whole garden in one shot this year until my boyfriend climbed up on the roof for one. Here's the whole garden in its glory. 

Veggie Gardens.

This is our main garden bed. We have planted, left to right, fall peas, asparagus seedlings, swiss chard, lettuces, radish, pole beans climbing the tee-pees, carrots, cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussel sprouts, beets, kohlrabi, celery, bush beans, three rows of potatoes, parsnips , rutabagas, leeks, red and white onions, peas that are dying, ground cherries, peppers, tomatoes and more bush beans. The garlic is at the top almost ready to be harvested and the cold frame is full of greens and scallions. 

Ground cherries, peppers and tomatoes with bush beans and dying peas at the end. 

Onions from seeds not sets. 

Rutabaga. 

We have two garden beds this year. This is my version of a three sisters bed. Corn, soybeans, cucumbers, squashes and melons planted together. My Rhododendron is hanging out behind this bed. 

First feed of baby carrots. 

Our first feed of beets for the year. The best part is since growing them under row covers the greens are in immaculate shape for steaming. Every other year we have problems with the greens. Nice beets with greens that were eaten to pieces. I would spray with the hose and different concoctions to try and lessen the bugs and pick them by hand. They would still attack and eat the greens. The row cover is a saviour.  

Flowers.

We are seeing lots of hummingbirds and bees around the yard right now due to all the blooms. I've been working on earlier spring/summer blooms since most of ours are concentrated to this time of year, with the exception of all the spring bulbs. 

Asiatic Lilies. 

Daylilies. 

Hollyhocks.

More lilies. 

The Versatile Blogger Award

I have very kindly been notified by Anita at Beverly Bees, http://www.beverlybees.com, that she has nominated me for the The Versatile Blogger Award.

I follow Anita on twitter and really enjoy reading her blog that stirs my desire to keep bees and use honey in and for everything. With the Beverly Bees blog, I can live my beekeeping dream vicariously through her frequent posts. I'm always trying to attract bees to my gardens and encourage them to stick around and spread their pollination love. Beverly Bees is a wealth of bee information including plants for bees, information for beginners wanting to keep bees and amazing bee photos. We cannot emphasize the importance of bees for our eco- system, and Beverly bees highlights how fantastic these creatures truly are.  

Thanks for the nomination from Beverly Bees, I am truly honoured!

Here are the rules:

1. Thank the Blogger who nominated you.
2. Include a link to their site.
3. Include the award image in your post.
4. Give 7 random facts about yourself.
5. Nominate 15 other Bloggers for the award.
6. When nominating, include a link to their site.
7. Let other Bloggers know they have been nominated.

Seven random facts about myself:

1. I am a Registered Holistic Nutrition Consultant who started gardening after learning that food that contains the most nutrients is freshly grown food.  My boyfriend and I now grow at least 70% of our food for the year including poultry for meat and eggs. From July until March we buy very little produce if any. We grow and harvest our own veggies all winter. We source things we cannot grow or raise from local, sustainable and nutritious sources. 

2. I love being active. I walk my dog twice a day, bike, hike, swim, skip rope, practice yoga, do push ups and sit ups,  garden and maintain the yard, play catch with my boyfriend,fish and fly fish, kayak at the beach and sometimes, although not as often as we would like, get our canoe out for a paddle. The older I get the less I can sit still, except to update my blog and work as a Holistic Nutrition Consultant. 

3. I never assume I know anything, it leaves no room for learning and growth. I am interested in everything and anything.  Diversity is extremely important in life. 

4. I'm terrified of snakes, even dead ones, but I'm working on that. They are good for the garden. 

5. I would love to completely live off the land someday. That's the goal we're working towards. I love bartering with people, trading asparagus spears for tomato transplants is a fantastic form of currency. 

6. I blare music constantly, especially when working outdoors. 

7. I'm extremely easy to please, the simple life is all we need.  I'm glad I've discovered this early in life.  Sometimes I feel like a much older person in a 26 year old body. 

15 bloggers I'm nominating include:

Plain and Joyful Living at Natural Earth Farm

From Seed to Scrumptious

Bees, Birds, Berries and Blooms.

Beverly Bees

Rainy Day Gardener.

Hard Work Homestead.

A Rural Journal

Old House Kitchen

Cold Antler Farm

Eco Yogini

Three Dogs in a Garden

Dutch House Kitchen Garden

Happy Goddess Gardens

Hand Made Therapy

For the Love of the Soil

Garden Shots.

These were actually snapped a couple days ago, it's too cloudy today for good pictures. 

This is the big picture of the garden, although since our garden continues to grow every year, we're unable to snap a picture of the entire garden any more. We also have another bed separate from this bed for corn, squashes, cucumbers, melons and soybeans.  

First year growing pole beans, I love them and I haven't even eaten any yet. Anything that grows upwards is always a great space saver in the backyard garden. 

The salad patch, baby mesclun mix lettuce. We have romaine and leaf lettuce planted besides, this mix we use mostly for salads.  

Bush beans, two trellis's full of peas, onions, cold frame and tomatoes, ground cherries and peppers at the top. 

Breakfast AKA sugar snap peas. The only pea variety I bother growing. I really enjoy shell peas, the reason I don't grow them is they take up so much space to obtain a really good crop. I often tuck a few into a corner here or there, although I opted out this year. 

Potatoes, beans, brussel sprouts, beets and carrots can be spotted here. 

Big bowl of swiss chard and kale. We've got a lot of this to eat up, thankfully it's so delicious we would never get sick of it. We usually steam our greens and top them with butter.  There's nothing quite like fresh, simple greens from the garden. 

Growing all our kale, with the exception of the plants still thriving in the cold frame, under row covers this year. Every year I find the young seedlings get attacked by pests which is quite hard on them. This year we seeded our broccoli, kale, cabbage and brussel sprouts under the row cover for protection with excellent results. The kale is buddied up here with beets under the same row cover. Our beets usually do quite well but the greens get so eaten that we don't eat them ourselves. We also planted our '3 sisters' garden under row cover this year for the heat amplifying quality of the row cover. Squashes, cucumbers and melons are planted with corn and soybeans for our version of a 3 sisters garden. The edamame or  soybeans are doing extremely well with seeds my sister picked me up from Annapolis Seeds. 

All in all the entire garden is doing extremely well this year. We're really having an exceptional growing year so far and hoping it keeps up. Last year was so wet and constantly raining, which presents quite the challenge when you have soil that consists mostly of clay like we do. Everything still did quite well, although not as well as it could of. This year, like every year, we added a lot of extra organic matter in case of another rainy year and the vegetables are really digging it. Our own chicken manure was finally aged long enough, two years, to apply to the garden.  Chicken manure is touted as one of the best manures to use as it is quite high in nitrogen and also contains a good amount of potassium and phosphorus making it a well balanced fertilizer. The high nitrogen level in chicken manure can present a problem when used too freshly on the garden. It can actually burn and kill plants if used to freshly. We compost our chicken manure to allow it to mellow out before using. We mix some of it with our regular compost to accelerate that compost and mix other components, like leaves and seaweed, with the remainder. You will read that composted chicken manure can be used after 12 months to as little as 6-9months, however I find it more beneficial to wait even longer than that. I've used composted chicken manure that was only a year old and it promptly burnt and killed plants on contact. Thankfully it was only weeds it killed as I was using it as the bottom layer on a lasagna bed. Also chances are there will be bedding, straw and wood shavings, mixed in with the chicken manure which require a bit more time to decompose. In my humble opinion, it's better to wait the two years before applying chicken manure to your garden. 

We have been enjoying lots of these beauties these days. 

We have little baby turkeys. These girls, all hens, are about 3 and 1/2 weeks old. They love the fan, sleeping in front of it, stretching their wings and just enjoying the gusts. 

The garden on yesterdays overcast afternoon. We have kale coming out our ears growing under that row cover along with beets. 

Chives still going strong. 

The garden several weeks ago. Amazing to see how much it has grown during the last stretch of super warm weather.