Yes, Jeremy and Hannah were married Saturday, July 15th. It was a wonderful day filled with happy smiles, good friends, loving family and some tears to tie it all together. I'll post more about the wedding next post. I'm still gathering pics from family and friends.
The months preceding the wedding are a blur to me now.....um, let's just say we put in some overtime here on the farm. Why, you ask? Because not only did the kids plan a wedding in mere weeks, but we invited our out-of-state family and friends to our farm the day after the wedding for a reunion. Yeah, that's where
my crazy came in to play.
You see, we've been working on many different projects over the 3-1/2 years since moving here....many have long been completed. But there are several that continue to be "works in progress". Ha! Not any longer. One of those not-quite done projects was my potager garden.
I've been playing around and dreaming about the final "look" of my little potager garden for 3 years now and this year I was determined to move things into high gear to get it as close to "done" as possible before all our company arrived. That involved over 7 tons of rock, (some as pea gravel for the paths, and some larger rounded river rock to line the flower beds)....2 pallets of garden soil, 70 landscape timbers and a 300' roll of 6' wide landscape tarp. Toss in over 100 plants, railroad timbers to hold back the pea gravel around my swing, and let's not forget to plant my summer veggies while we're at it. I can say one thing about the last 3 months......I've got a great tan from all the outside work I put in on the garden.
I've shown you pictures of the garden before.....in bits and pieces, as I've worked on it these last couple of years. But now it's much nearer to completion. Wellllllll, is a garden ever
really finished? I guess not. Okay, so it's probably more accurate to say it's about 95% done. Here are the double gates Joel and I built as the main entrance. The large maple tree is off to the left of the pic and gives welcome shade for the swing during the hottest part of the day.
Taking land that used to be a field and organically killing the grasses, designing paths and covering the paths with pea gravel became a lot more work than I ever anticipated. Thankfully I had John, my garden helper-dude, that put a lot of muscle behind the wheelbarrow. And I know I personally moved tons of rock by myself on the weeks when John wasn't available to help out. This swing in the pic above used to be under our cover of trees by the alpaca pasture. Now I get to sit under the maple and gaze down into my favorite view on the farm.....the valley below us.
The potager is a combination of veggies and flowers, herbs and medicinal plants, too. This end of the garden is the workhorse portion. There are beds of cantaloupe, watermelon, fennel, tomatoes, zucchini and yellow squash, snap peas and cucumbers.
This side of the garden contains the herbs for cooking and the flowering plants I grow that get dehydrated and turned into tea that we drink all winter long.
Here's a closer look at the tea side of the garden. There is echinacea, German chamomile, lavender and lemon balm. In the wheelbarrow is regular mint and chocolate mint is in a bucket at the back of the wheelbarrow. Surrounding the plants on the outside edges are the thornless blackberry bushes that have yielded like crazy this year. I'm still picking berries every other day after harvesting for over a month.
Here is the herb side of the garden with wine bottles edging the beds and pea gravel in the pathways where I walk. There is oregano, chives, two huge rosemary bushes, basil, French tarragon, parsley, cilantro and hyssop. All of these herbs get cut and dehydrated inside the house in my handy dehydrator. Then they get put into Ball jars for use over the next year.
Between the herbs and the swing is a large bed that will remain mostly open until next Spring's planting season. I'm still deciding what I want to plant in there, and for now I'm quite content to let it be an open space.
I put perennial flowers in the three beds up closest to the house where we can see the riot of colors whenever we walk outside our doors. These hardy plants will/should come back each year on their own, making them a frugal investment as I should only have to plant them once. They will all more than double their size from what they look like now and will fill in, creating a cottage garden.
Joel and I built these raised beds last year and they have come in really handy. In the foreground used to be lettuces, but it's too hot for them now. In between the lettuce rows I planted onions that are growing nicely. There are also leeks in this bed and celery in the back. The second bed is nothing but beets and carrots that are currently waiting for me to harvest them. Ahem....in my next free moment I will scurry out there and get right on that.
The third raised bed is hard to see, but it is loaded with Beauregard sweet potatoes. The vines are going crazy. I can hardly wait to harvest the potatoes this Fall.
This is the side with the cantaloupe, zucchini and tomatoes. All the plants are doing pretty well and I'm harvesting almost daily now.
And then one of my favorite foods is fennel. It's delicious sliced up with onions, potatoes, carrots and sweet potatoes. Spill some Extra Virgin Olive Oil on the whole mess, toss with your hands and add sea salt. Bake on a baking sheet at 425 degrees for half an hour or until the veggies are roasted and enjoy! Yummy.
This is one of the three flower beds near the entrance....this pic was taken more than a month ago, you should see how much the plants have grown since then. The blueberry bushes are on the left of the bed.
This is the third flower bed, flanking the swing. This Fall I hope to replace the 4 electrified wires that are my current fence and put a more permanent fence in. BUT not until the temps drop into the 60's. Nope, no more fencing in the heat of summer for me!!! Been there, done that too many times.
Check out our blackberries. These babies are the size of half my thumb. They continue to produce and produce. I've been freezing them because I didn't have time to make my jam during the wedding preparations. Now I have so many that I can whip up several batches of my favorite seedless blackberry jam, and still have plenty of berries left over to make blackberry cobbler all winter long.
Oh, how I love my garden. Last weekend Joel and I stopped at Johnson nursery in Cookeville. What a fabulous garden center it is, too. I brought home a gorgeous set of Corinthian Bells.....a huge wind chime made with powder coated aluminum. They are now hanging in the maple tree next to my swing in the potager. The chimes are "musically designed to produce soft, rich tones" and sound off in the light breeze we almost always have blowing thru our farm. Sitting on my swing, looking down into our valley with the chimes playing a melody for me has brought tears to my eyes......I just feel so lucky to be able to enjoy all that God has provided for us.
All I can say about my garden is..........happy, happy, happy.
But now I'm off to can some more veggies,
Debbie
