Overview of the garden for June 9, 2018

Hello, steemians, and welcome to my garden, eh!

I haven't done a garden overview post in a while, so I thought now would be a good time to do it since all the planting is done now.

I guess the best way to start this would be a picture of as much of the garden as I can get into the picture. Closest to the viewer is the popcorn area, beyond that is the potato bed with yellow potatoes planted in it. As you can see, not a lot of the potatoes have come up yet, but they're starting to show in spots. To the right side of the picture are 2 of my raised beds. The closer bed has bush green beans in it, the other one has carrots in it. In the far end of the picture, beyond the grass and walkway is the garden bed where I planted the red potatoes. Those are all up now except a couple spots where nothing came up. Outside of the picture to the left side is the container garden and 2 more raised beds, which I will show later in the post.

Here is a better picture of the 2 raised beds along side the main garden. The 2 trees past the end of the raised beds are plum trees.

At the end of the raised beds is a rain water storage container that I also use for watering part of the garden. When the rain collection barrels get full, I pump them out to this container. I have fence picket boards fastened to 3 sides of the metal frame to keep the sunlight from eating the plastic container, and also to make it look a bit better from the street.

Here is the container garden and the raised bed with the tomato plants. In front of the container garden is my strawberry bed. You can also see the greenhouse in this picture. I have tomato plants in the greenhouse.

A closer look at the container garden and the raised bed behind it. The first 4 containers have bush yellow wax beans. The next 2 containers have a sweet banana pepper plant each. After that is a pot with some carrots, a container with 2 cucumber plants, and a container with a "Sweet 100" cherry tomato plant. The last container that's half out of the picture contains a sage plant. In the raised bed behind the containers, I have 8 tomato plants, 4 cucumber plants, and various marigolds to help keep some of the bugs away from the tomato plants.

Close to the container garden is this triangular raised bed that occupies an otherwise unused space. I wasn't going to plant it this year, I had been using the space to store extra dirt. I ended up using most of the extra dirt to fill the new raised bed where the tomato plants are, so I had some extra space available for planting. It seemed like a good place to put the zucchini plants this year. I also started another small compost pile for leaves and kitchen waste such as peelings and coffee grounds. I still need to work on building a better container for the compost pile, but there's no hurry on that. The pot behind the zucchini plants has a rosemary plant that is 2 years old now. I brought it into the house for the winter last fall, so it survived and is doing pretty well outside now.

Next is the garden bed with the red potatoes. I used to have a raised bed on the edge of this but it was falling apart pretty badly this spring, so I took it down and added the space to the garden bed. The 2 shorter rows were planted earlier than the other 2 rows, and were up well enough to hill them up. Along the sidewalk edge of the garden bed is a row of black oil sunflowers that really needs to be thinned out. On the far end of the picture, past the black tank, is the experimental wheat plot, which will be the next picture after this.

The experimental wheat plot. This is an ancient wheat variety called Emmer wheat. This is the wheat that was grown by the Egyptians. The ground cover growing with the wheat is white clover. The raised bed on the other side of the wheat has 4 blueberry bushes that I planted this year. The tree at the end of the raised bed is 1 of our 2 apple trees.

Aside from this garden here at home, I also have a community garden plot that I'm using to grow flour corn, hard beans, and squash in the old "3 sisters" method.