My how this garden changed in the last year!
The herb spiral starting to fade. Will enlarge it a bit before next year. Want to do more cilantro, mint and basil varieties in here.
Getting all my materials together for the hugelkultur. Note: little boys love digging in the dirt. They’ll love to help with the trench-digging part of this project.
Gotta have a rainbarrel for water harvesting. Make sure it’s up a bit higher than the yard so gravity feeding is possible.
It’s pretty gnarly-looking while being assembled, but it’s so full of good stuff! Shouldn’t have to water this nearly as often as conventional bed.
Gives you a good sense of what’s inside. Grass, wood chips, rotten logs, compost, manure, lined with newspaper to keep weeds from popping up around the base.
What a mess. The storm before the calm.
Put my sweet little herb-spiral to bed for the winter.
Portrait of a hugelkultur in Fall. Love that sumac!
Will prune that cherry tree in the Spring to allow light onto the hugelkultur.
Took a chunk of aster from my mom’s neighbour and it loves it here. Soil is still pretty bad, but these lovely purple flowers don’t seem to care.
Had some leftover soil. Thinking of doing a potato cage with it. Or make my baby hugel beds a bit bigger.
Love this explosion of colour in the fall! Just spectacular.
Peeping out the window, ripening tomatoes on the sill.
Hoping this wisteria will bloom this year. It’s twining around the deck very nicely. The birdhouse on the window was made from popsicle sticks, but it didn’t make it through a windstorm.
The red bush in the back is a lilac and will be gorgeous and purple in the Spring. I love that smell!
Something so beautiful about the mix of death and life. That was a very yummy squash.
All of the cabbage I planted got a white powdery mildew or something on it, so we didn’t get to harvest any of it this year. My cucumbers didn’t do well either, probably because the soil was so bad.
Hard to believe this was just two huge cedar bushes when we got here.
The cherry tomatoes were SO tasty, threw some marigolds in with them in the orange pot.
Of course we can’t forget about the importance of composting! In the city I had a very small vermicomposter that would take about 1 Litre a week of food waste.
My family eats largely fresh fruit and vegetables, not a lot from packages, therefore we produce much more than 1 Litre a week, more like 1 Litre a day!
That’s why I’m so happy to have this “Tall boy” for all my scraps and yard waste and toilet rolls, and newspaper.
Some people are not a fan of this model of composter due to the difficulty in mixing and harvesting.
I agree with those points, but I got some gorgeous compost out of it last fall when I was making the big hugelkultur bed and amending all of my garden with it.
Banana peels, egg shells, lettuce ends, nut shells, coffee grinds…mmmm.
Peek-a-boo!
I heard that the mountain berries ferment over the winter and the birds eat them and get a little drunk on it!
The mountain ash is so lovely when covered with snow.
Looking at this makes me “imagine” summer!
The bean teepee looks pretty cool covered with snow.
After a big snow we couldn’t even see the beds anymore.
I might do a page with just this angle to show how the seasons change. It’s pretty amazing.
A record snowfall in January, up to my hips!
Where I sun myself in the summer…
The hugelkultur is there, I swear! Soaking up all the nutrients and settling, getting ready to explode with food next Spring.
Poor rose bush, encased in snow. Wonder what I should use that bamboo in the distance for…another trellis, perhaps.
And then there was MORE snow!
Extreme mullein close-up!
Mullein is SO soft. My brother calls it “nature’s toilet paper”.
Shrivelled cherries. These are not the edible kind.
Wind chime comes in handy as there is a loud road behind those trees.
Inside of a dead sunflower.
Art, or decaying plant? BOTH!
The little sunflower seed that couldn’t.
Will leave this sunflower head to rot, so as to add organic material to the soil.
A dried up corn husk after the rain.
Some weirdo in the yard…
Contrast is my friend.
If you haven’t taken photos of what grows in your gutters, you have missed an opportunity!
Frozen bubbles with grass.
Snow almost gone and it’s only mid-February! Time to start some onion seeds!
I *think it’s a sunflower stalk. Can’t be sure now.
More vege-art.
Mulch away, leaves!
Snow-logged cabbage after a thaw.
See you soon, iris!
Looks kind of gross, but it’s kale leaves.
This represents the “Share the surplus” ethic of permaculture. You’re welcome, birdies!
Jellyfish? Blob-creature? Nope, rotten cabbage.
Rotten kale. Will rip this up in the Spring and compost.