I realize I haven’t done a real garden update in a while.

All the garden beds are growing really well, except maybe that the squashes trying to take over the world.
The tomato plants are all over the place ( I couldn’t find any real sturdy cages for them so most of them are just out of control).
The peas are going gangbusters, and it seems like my attempt to space them 2 week out didn’t do a big thing (that or I’m in for another round of peas in 2 weeks).
The onions are doing well as are the strawberries which are still flowering like mad.
The zucchini has been really tasty, the gooseberries meanwhile have been “interesting”
Mixing flowers and plants hasn’t been a total disaster, at least not yet. (although you can see a petunia battling some peas)
The blueberries are amazing, even if they are in a pretty low count.
Raspberries are a bit disappointing in their volume, but they were just transplanted and I think most of them might be biennial (every 2 years)
I basically have too much produce right now, but I can’t really start a CSA since it would be like, “this week all you get are peas… lots and lots of peas”
As you can also see, we have a giant compost bin, it’s almost full so we’re going to be building a second one so we can let that one “cook”

You can click on the images below to see the full screen version.

I love perennials and they are 95% of the flowers I plant. It’s just so great to have them come back year after year and you can work on creating new beds of flowers instead of just putting them in every year.

This bed actually started with absolutely nothing, but this is the earliest picture I have

And voila 2 months later!

Here’s another few flowers that came along:

There are also a few “not ready yet” flowers that are coming soon:

I’m not really good at taking in between project pictures or even before and after so this will be a bit short.

First we started with the smallest garden bed that will house the haskaps. We used landscaping ties (mini ties) and it’s 16 feet by 4 feet total.

There are currently 5 haskap bushes, 3 different varieties (beauty, blizzard, Aurora) and we’ll add the big one we have in the yard here after this year’s harvest.

We added landscaping fabric and cedar mulch to finish it off.

The second one is a bit more ambitious, It’s 8 feet by 32 feet.

For both of these we started by digging the perimeter, putting landscaping fabric and then adding 3/4 gravel for drainage.

We then added the mini ties. To get them to stick together we used some timber-lock 6″ screws. These suckers are massing and will make pretty much anything stick together. It even fixes some slight warpness that some of the mini ties had.

Since 8 feet is too wide to be able to reach, we decided to dig up a bit of the “bad” dirt on the outsides and use it to create a 2 feet wide “lane” 2 feet away from the fence so that we can reach everything.

You can see the strip in the middle where nothing is growing. Then at the front left there are watermelons planted and at the top right there is a black current bush as well as 4 blueberry bushes (that I’ve since learnt I’ll need to move if I want the back row to be all raspberries.

Since that didn’t use up all of the triple mix we’re making another planter, but this one much simpler (fence boards with 2 by 4s) at the other end of the yard that will be for the Blueberries and a flower garden. We decided to do it that way since the mini ties cost a lot and it takes a lot more time. While they are nicer and they’ll last longer we can always go back and redo it in a later year if we want to.

On top of all that we setup the garden I had build last year. We made 4 feet rows with the same 2 feet walkways in between. We then added the soaker hoses. I’m not sure the soaker hoses will be enough to be honest but we’ll see if we can make it work. Either way, almost everything is planted. The only things that remain for the main garden are the peas that I’ll plant in 2 weeks to ensure the harvest stays for as long as possible.

While doing this I was chatting with a friend and when I was telling them I was just planting stuff, barely reading the guidelines and not really caring about all the companion stuff she referred to me as a YOLO gardener.

Gardening is one of the few things that I let myself “fail” at. In a sense that I’m not trying to be perfect. I’m not doing a whole bunch of research, I’m just watching a few youtube videos here and there and just overall enjoying myself. I feel like often we have hobbies that turn into chores because we seek perfection.

I’m going to write a longer post about this, but I’m starting to think that anything worth doing, is worth half-assing.