Look at this gorgeous poppy! And this daisy!
I love my ornamentals, but this year I’m loving my veggies as well. We have beans, peas, and radishes ready to pick, and last night we harvested a whole bunch of Bull’s Blood Beets. We chopped the little beets into little squares and steamed them with their greens, and it was wonderful. Beet greens have such wonderful flavor! I have a lot more beet seedlings started. More Bull’s Blood, and also Golden Beets.
New and exciting in my garden this year are Ground Cherries. I’ve never grown these before, but so far the plants and the fruit are looking good.
Also completely new to me are gooseberries. We have our first one beginning to ripen, and I can’t wait to taste it! Assuming it’s not a complete dislike, we’ll be putting in more bushes next year.
The apples are looking great….
….and so are my peppers! I think I finally found a place they like to grow in my garden.
My favorite veggies of all this year, though, are my cabbage. I don’t know why, but I just find them tremendously pleasing. I’d grow them as ornamentals!
In fact, I’m loving my fruits and veggies so much this year, that in addition to turning the south-east chicken run into a garden (the hens will still get to use it during the off-season), I also have plans to turn about 1/3 of the front yard into a veggie garden. Right now I’ve just dug up a section in the middle of the future bed, and planted a bunch of squash, beets, and various other sun-loving things.
Eventually, we’ll fence this section in, and then the Girls will get to do a little off-season bug patrol here as well. And I really can’t tell you strongly enough how incredibly helpful they are. My garden was always OVERRUN with slugs and other nasties. I had a ‘Slug Patrol’ of ducks, which helped, but not nearly enough. I used to go out in the evening, and the grass would be full of huge slugs. It was the Great Slug Migration every night!
Then I got chickens. Suddenly, the slugs vanished! Now I only see the occasional ‘baby’ slug, and my lettuce aren’t destroyed overnight, my pansies aren’t eaten off at the stem, and my strawberries aren’t full of holes. Chickens, you see, unlike ducks, eat slug eggs. And if the slugs don’t hatch, they can’t infest your yard. Next year, I plan to get a couple of ducks again, but just to patrol the garden and pick up the few slugs that do manage to hatch. It’s going to be the perfect system, and I just can’t wait to put it into practice! The chickens will get to run in the garden in winter and early spring, before the plants get going. The ducks will get garden access year-around, because they don’t scratch up and eat plants like chickens do.
And in case you think my slug situation is a fluke, my gardening friend Laura recently started letting her chickens run through her garden in the off-season. In Spring she came to me and said: “It’s so strange. I have no slugs in the garden, even though I still have lots of them in the front yard! I don’t understand it!” I knew immediately why….
Out of Eden 