Showing posts with label no till method. Show all posts
Showing posts with label no till method. Show all posts

Sunday, May 25, 2025

Gardening with art & zen (peaceful water & rock features)

To help you get your home garden started, visit gardens in your area. It will help you visualize and learn what type of plants grow well together, positioning, and types of plants that do best in your area. This garden I visited yesterday was a wedding venue, and I absolutely adored it. The hosta plants were large and in charge! There was even a lime tree growing fruits in my area's gardening zone 6-- I was shocked. The only explanation I had was that this garden was heated in the soil. I'm not sure...


This particular garden was filled with perennial and annual flowers, red maples, pines, tomato and pepper plants, water features and sculpture pieces that made the garden a piece of artwork. That is the thing to remember, your garden is a blank canvas. You can choose the colors, the methods of planting much like painting, and you can have as many bushes, flowers, or trees as you want on your canvas. 










Saturday, May 15, 2021

Mid May Veggie Garden

I have to start out with some flower pictures first. Then I'll show you what is growing on in the gardens this week. 



Iris flowers to me, are the sign of May and they always grow around Mother's Day. So I call them Mothets day flowers. Although I bought some cut Lillies for my mom on Mother's day last week.




This past Monday, Ashley and I went down to the creek and had a little fire while we relaxed and enjoyed nature. Here are some wild flowers and such by the creek...







After Monday this week, I mowed, weeded, and sowed seeds around the garden. It was a weedy mess last week, and now that I have weeded, my plants can finally breathe! I applied some of my own compost around the vegetable plants as well.

The garden bed here, I cleaned yesterday. In addition to weeding, I applied my entire compost pile that I have been making for the last 6 months. 













My hope for this garden bed is to plant squash, corn and beans.  

The next garden bed here is full of yarrow and turnip plants flowering so I won't have many weeds to grub out. Yarrow is supposed to put nitrogen back into the soil, so I see this wild perennial as a plus in my garden. I started with a couple of these plants that I pulled from a field, and now it is a fully functioning patch on its own. 


Similarly, the next garden beds are basically my cilantro patches. There is probably 40 or more cilantro plants clustered in these 2 garden beds. I have inter planted spinach, arugula, peppers, lettuce, radish, and much more here. Now, the key is to keeping these beds watered, fertilized with compost, and protected from critters (which are all challenges as a gardener. 

The remaining garden beds have been weeded and I planted carrots and various things around the established patches of strawberries and radishes growing. I was able to pull up some beautiful radishes this week...



The garden beds here still look like a mess but it's really only because it's a bad picture. I have to keep the netting on every single bed to keep my cats out and to keep birds out. My cats want to scratch in the soil to use it for their personal litter box and the birds like to peck the soil to eat the seeds I've sowed. 







As you can see, the netting I lay on the garden beds doesn't lay totally flat as I have mature radish and kale plants flowering. I have many more vegetable seeds to plant here. 

In front of my garden, the blueberry plants are doing great! There's lots of blueberries on all of the bushes but my fear is birds pecking the fruits. I have used netting in the past to protect them but I'm using that same netting now for these garden beds. It is frustrating!





At my other garden, I have to till more so I can plant beans and corn as well. In my other garden, I have potatoes and peas growing. I have planted melons and squash seed but I haven't been up theret this week yet to check on this other garden.

I'll keep you posted!


 

 

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Will have squash soon & beautiful parts of the no till garden

Row of Yellow squash fruiting


Rows of Tomatoes fruiting with basil

Row of peppers
































Watermelon, cantaloupe and tomatoes 


Cucumbers finally flowering & beans sprouted


Beets, cabbage, lettuce, cilantro 


Saturday, February 7, 2015

Recycled (car/truck) Tire Gardens

It's amazing how much trash goes to the landfill, but think how much trash could be reused for gardening, or making homes. Car/truck tires can be layered to create a whole HOUSE! Earthships are made of tires containing dirt and rebar for support. In this post I will be specifically discussing tire gardens.
I usually find my tires along the side of the road; and I have even found 10 tires piled up in the woods! I know several people who have grown potatoes in tires. Carrots and onions do best in raised beds, which may be great for growing in tires. It's possible to grow any annual or biennial plant in a tire. Something like a tree will not be best suited for growing in a tire.

Personally, I would not grow vegetables in tires (especially if they haven't been completely cleaned).  I am using 5 tires for growing Ferns and Chrysanthemums. If I obtain more tires I will continue to grow flowers in them. I would like to paint Tires and create a unique Tire wall as you can see from other gardener's tire gardens-- see below:

gardening channel
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photo source

pinterest

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flikr
No dime design
photo source
photo source
the Tire Garden
According to Linda Chalker-Scott, Associate Professor and Extension Urban Horticulturist, WSU Puyallup Research and Extension Center, we do know that "rubber tires will be a constant source of leached metals, PAHs, and other pollutants as the tires degrade. Whether or not it's enough to worry about from a human health perspective is unknown." Also, the black rubber can get hot in direct sunlight, which can damage your plants.