My Darling Wife’s Beautiful Garden

As many of you know, we love food. No really, we looooove food. The fresher, the cleaner, the better. And it doesn’t get much better than picked from your own garden. Now, I am the luckiest girl because well, I get to do the “fun” jobs when it comes to our garden. I get to pick most of our seeds, I get to transplant little plantlings into the ground, I get to pick the ripened fruit, and best of all, I get to be creative with how we cook the food! DW spoils me and does all of the hard labour and the annoying tasks like turning soil, hand picking bugs and pests (organic gardening), constantly watering and weeding, as well as general maintenance of the plants (staking them, tying them up, pruning, etc.). She spends hours everyday working in her garden, so today, I decided that I’d do a little photo feature on my wife’s hard earned garden. 

We’ve been gardening for over five years now, and every year we make improvements to our systems and structures. One year we connected rain barrels to the awning over our patio, another year we added a pear tree and cut down a small maple tree, another year we added raised beds, another year DW constructed a trellis for our vining plants to climb. We’re into being efficient and environmentally friendly, so when we learn new things, we make changes to how we operate our little garden.

  
I’ll give you a tour:

 These are two out of our eight sweet pepper plants, just starting to fruit: 
  We succession plant cilantro because we use it so much in our cooking, and these are just starting:  

Two kinds of basil: sweet basil (front) and Thai basil (behind):

 
  The snow pea and snap pea bed:

   Juno and Clem’s chew stick pile, which DW is constantly tidying up:

  Raised carrot bed (with random other things like cilantro and beets that were dug up and moved there by squirrels): 
 Purple beans (on fence) and succession planted green beans (and a little Clementine):

   
 
 Swiss chard and lettuce bed:  
Swiss chard, gai lan, and some other random stuff we allowed to go to seed:

 
Beet and green onion bed:   
Plants in containers, and our sad pear tree, which was destroyed in the ice storm of 2013/2014:

 
 Sweet pepper:  
Cayenne peppers:

 Black beauty and Asian long eggplant:  
 

  

 
  
Zucchini patch:   
Can you spot the two zucchinis?

 
Rhubarb, potatoes, and Jerusalem artichokes: 
 

Acorn squash trellis (avec lacinato kale, lettuce, leeks, and wild asparagus) and the farmer herself:

  
 Look at the size of those acorn squash leaves!
The bottom bed of tomatoes, potatoes, short curly green and lacinato kale, and a front row of leeks: 
  
  
  
 
Butternut squash climbing another trellis over the shed, and the compost bin that houses Clem’s pet snake, Slitherin:
 A whole whack of dill and asparagus going to seed: