It’s time for another update from the garden!

Some quick background for new visitors: I garden in NE Minnesota where we have a very short growing season. I use hugelkultur raised beds and apply permaculture methods throughout my garden. Nearly everything I grow are heirloom varieties and all are organically managed- no chemicals, pesticides, or anything unnatural.

August 1st, 2015

Things are growing and changing! We’ve harvested the garlic and half of the bed of peas has been removed and replanted with a fall bush bean crop. We got a TON of peas this year. I was especially happy with the Canoe variety which had long, full pods full of peas. I dried and saved many pods for replanting next year.

The runner beans and sweet meat squash have filled in the old ladder quite nicely.

Wishing the ladder were taller…I wonder how high they would climb if they could?

Companion planting: sweet corn and sweet meat squash.

Corn and cucumbers. We’ve been making lots of pickles! I’m extremely pleased with this Double Yield cucumber variety. Loads of blossoms means lots of happy bees…and lots of cucumbers 🙂

The very first of our purple bell peppers. Our pepper plants really struggled this year. First, I lost all of the ones I’d started from seed to the end of May/early June frost. Then these guys really struggled with the fluctuations in temperature from hot days to cold nights. I’m just happy to see anything come out of them!

I’m super excited at the prospect of actually getting vine ripened tomatoes this year. We don’t typically start seeing them until the end of August, and last year we had our first frost mid-September- I didn’t get a single red one on the vine in 2014. But my plants this year have really taken advantage of the heat we’ve been blessed with and I have loads of tomatoes!

August 14th, 2015

More changes! The potato plants are dying back and we’ve harvested some beautiful Colorado Rose potatoes whose skins are almost hot pink! The peas have been completely taken out and the entire bed is now planted with bush beans which will hopefully give us beans before the weather turns too cold. Onions will be harvested today, as well as the rest of the romaine removed and fed to the rabbits. That bed will be planted with a fall crop of peas.

The keyhole/hugelkultur bed has some happy tomato plants! I grew a lot of paste tomatoes this year as we sure love our spaghetti sauce, and you can tell that the paste tomatoes sure do love their constant feeding from the compost ring situated in the middle of the bed.

The compost ring is camouflaged quite well in this bed. There are 9 tomato plants here, surrounding the the ring. Calendula, basil, and onions also make their home here.

This ladder is almost too pretty. And I love how it attracts swarms of bees and hummingbirds!

Even one of my sweet meat squash has found a happy home nestled within the ladder along with its runner bean friends.

The cucumbers and corn make great friends too.

This bed was the last one that I planted- and truly, just threw stuff in. The corn was so eaten by rabbits when it was just a few inches tall and I thought nothing would come of them. But they’ve pulled through!

And I am just too excited at the prospect of getting some watermelon in our cool climate.

Sorry, I couldn’t pick just one. I’m so happy to see the huge increase in bees this year! They’re just buzzing! I planted this Cosmos in my corn/cucumber bed and between the prolific blooms of this one plant, as well as the cucumber and squash blooms and the massive amounts of nettle growing all over- the bees are busy, busy, busy. Love it.

How is your garden growing this season?