My gardens…….

There’s something about growing flowers and sharing them with others that brings a feeling of joy and pride that is hard to describe. When you take a tiny seed and care for it until it blooms into a gorgeous flower, the flowers become personal. I can show you their baby pictures…..when they were little seedlings!

Every year is different, every season is different, every month is different, and every flower is different. It’s a never ending lesson about what works for me in my area and what doesn’t.

My garden consists of two main growing areas - one is the raised bed area behind our old barn, the other is a row bed made of landscape fabric. I also have several perennial beds around our property that I harvest from.

Raised beds…

The raised bed area started as one 4’ x 8’ bed where we grew vegetables. The following year we added five more 4’ x 8’ vegetable beds. The year after that we added more beds - mostly flowers, very few veggies. The year after that…..you guessed it, we added more beds. Now they are all flowers. Every year we add more. Yes, I’m obsessed!

The raised beds are mostly full of my early season ‘cool flowers’, which are flowers that prefer the cooler weather of early spring, flowers like snapdragons, bachelor buttons, sweet William, ranunculus, feverfew, strawflower, and Canterbury bells to name a few.

raised beds behind our barn

Row bed…

The row bed consists of 4 rows that are 50 feet long with 3 foot walkways between the rows. This bed is made with heavy duty, woven landscape fabric that lasts for years. We added this bed to the farm in 2022 and are still using the same fabric. We outlined the bed with cement pavers to secure the edges, help keep the weeds out, and to prevent the fabric from getting sucked up in the lawn mower.

We put the landscape fabric down in late winter. We did not till, we just laid it right over the grass. The grass broke-down and added to the soil health, we have a lot of earthworms! In the spring when my seedlings were ready to plant out, we burned holes in the fabric with a torch then used an auger attachment on a drill to remove the soil from the holes. I filled them with a mix of our native soil, a lot of Black Kow compost and a sprinkle of Plant Tone fertilizer. My seedlings love it! We drill out the holes and add those amendments every year.

This picture shows the bed before we had finished burning all the holes. Different sections have different spacing for different flowers. I like to plant close together and rarely follow the recommended spacing.

In this bed, in 2025, I’m growing frosted explosion grass, flamingo feather celosia, asters, statice, marigolds, gomphrena, lemon basil, cinnamon basil, Floret zinnias, 2 kinds of Floret celosia-dusty rose and coral reef, jewels of opar, craspedia, honeywort, ageratum, amaranth, and zinnias.

row bed

Perennial beds…

My perennial beds are great because they come up on their own, I don’t have to start them from seed every year. These are plants that are hardy in our growing zone of 6B and can survive our harsh winters. Some of the perennials I grow are daffodils, peonies, bleeding hearts, hellebores, allium, bee balm, scabiosa (pincushion flower), iris, salvia, and several different varieties of echinacea (coneflower), rudbeckia (black eyed Susan), and crysanthemum..