I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse, 1854
My home vegetable garden has filled up with beans and basil. And tomatoes and cucumbers are doing great too. Nothing like summer abundance.
(The two big bushes at the lower left are still there. Soon they will be removed for my cutting garden. I like to imagine rows of flowers there.)
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Love the sledge hammer! The perfect gardening tool for all those delicate garden chores.
Hi Kathy, I also wanted to grow flowers amongst veggies at my home patch and the lottie. I love Dahlias, you used to be able to buy bunches of them when I was a young girl 35 odd years ago. So I grew some annuals from seed and planted the plantlets at the lottie and at home here in the patch. I will certainly do them again next year, great colours and the bees adore them. We had a kaleidascope of tomatoes and 3 types of lettuce and home grown cucumber that keeps much better than bought ones with our evening meal tonight, isn't it great. (Excuse my enthusiasm).
Marian(LondonUK)
Ah, the sledge hammer. I should have put that away days ago. I was hoping no one noticed it…. (maybe I'll photoshop it out. Scissors and string too.
I was trying to get the dahlia stakes into the ground deeper because the dahlias (to the far right, off the photo) are pulling them over. But, the poles are 8 feet tall and I can barely lift the sledge hammer. Didn't work. Poles have probably fallen over again…
My 5 foot tall tomato supports are another issue. Tomatoes have grown to the top of them and then down to the ground again. And no sign that they're through growing any time soon. I can run them back up the supports again!
I just love your aerial photos…they're so great. I'm thinking flowers in the lower left will be wonderful!
Your garden still looks great! I think the heat got to my garden. Everything shriveled up and died. I have pulled up everything now except the tomatoes. Have lots of green ones. I also left the zuchini and will hope for one more.
Need to make room for the fall planting anyway.
Hi Kathy,
Loved this aerial shot. However I have this question. I see there is no path (except for the one in the middle) to reach into the interiors of either side your garden. Don't you feel the need to reach those corners anytime?
This answer is vital to me, as am very new to gardening and right now am planning my garden layout. Overall dimensional of my garden would be very close to what you have here in this pic.
I mix my veggies with flowers all over the place, as my yard gets full sun only in scattered locations. My tomato plant, for example, is in the middle of a sunny pocket that's full of daffodils in the spring. Once the bulbs die down, the tomato goes in.
I agree those five foot cages are a joke. It's just enough for the tomato to shoot up to the top before it even fruits. Then it clambers over the peony bush and the euonymous next to it. Another good reason to have a mixed planting.
Nice picture Kathy!
Tyra
Beautiful!! I guess one up-side to a cool and rainy (and long!) spring is that your plants are better supplied to thrive during the hot late summer months.
Kathy … the Hawthorne quote is a keeper … Thank-you. There is another from that same Old Manse manuscript that I thought you might like.
"For a few summer weeks it is good to live as if this earth were heaven."
It is hard to reconcile the gloomy themes of his literature with such a buoyant spirit.
How wonderful! Thank you for the quote.