I have been wanting to share a garden video with everyone for a month or more now.  It seems that something always needs to be done in the garden, from around March through late October.  This year, we expanded our raised beds in April.  We had the one long row of raised beds with the pea gravel walkway down the middle, but I wanted more planting area, so we added two more square beds and another cattle panel trellis with walkway down the center.  Corkey was able to take care of a drainage issue we had under the porch as we did the expansion, so it was a win-win.  We just love how it turned out, and we have utilized every inch of our planting space!

Outdoor Kitchen:

Last summer, we created the outdoor kitchen area for Corkey.  He has a Blackstone griddle, a standard grill, a Kamado Joe smoker and a Cuisinart sink and prep table.  We also added the overhead lights, which are decorative and practical. Having lights on both sides of the back of the house lights up the whole back yard!

Stock Tank Pool:

The star of the show of course, is our Stock Tank Pool. I discovered these pools on Instagram during Covid and knew I wanted one. Due to high demand, both the pools and the pumps were hard to come by until the following summer. Ultimately, we found a great local operation to deliver and install ours and they did a great job.  (Check out Stock Tank Life on Instagram or on their website.

We had already prepped and leveled the area years ago when our son was little. We did that to create an area for his trampoline, so we had the hardest part of the project taken care of before we even started.  We NEVER use our neighborhood pool anymore, we love the convenience, peace and quiet of our pool. Some weekends we are out there both Saturday and Sunday, and some week days, Corkey even gets in for a few minutes after work.  We fill it up in March and drain and cover it in October.  Even during the months that it is too cool to get into, we love having the pool open, the sound of the fountain is so relaxing.  We both agree the stock tank pool is the best addition we have made to the garden!  In the future, we may finish out the exterior surround with cedar wood planks, or stone wall blocks.  Right now, we have it trimmed out with bamboo stakes for a decorative, tiki look, but those have aged and need to be replaced.

Vegetable Garden:

It was hard choosing the perfect time of year to show off the garden.  I wanted the plants to be full and healthy, but not dying off yet.  At one point, the potato vines looked pretty rough, just before it was time to harvest them, so I didn’t want to film that.  Right now, we are on the verge of many things coming to an end.   I think the tomatoes are played out for the most part.  The older cucumber vines are starting to turn yellow, so we may lose them.  I’m grateful I planted a second plant last month – cucumbers are my favorite! I eat them almost as soon as I pick them!  This was the first year I had 6 – 8 cucumbers in the crisper almost all summer because I couldn’t eat them as fast as they were coming in!

Our tomatoes did great as well, I canned 5 pints of homemade salsa for later, and refrigerator canned a quart of salsa for now.  My son eats chips and salsa almost every day and he loved it!  Every ingredient was from our garden: tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapeno peppers.  I had never canned salsa before, so I was very pleased with how it turned out!

Here's a full list of what we planted this year.  I have indicated if we planted from seed or plant beside each item.  A few things are perennials, or perhaps not truly perennials, but we were just lucky they came back from last year.  I have typed those items in italics.

Flower & Vegetable List:

Zinnias (seed & plants)

Sunflowers. - five or six varieties all from seed

Marigolds (plants)

Black Eyed Susan (plant)

Black Eyed Susan Vine (plant)

Purple Coneflower (plant)

Yellow Coneflower (plant)

Pink Coneflower (plant)

Gladiolas (bulbs)

Gerber daisies (plants)

Peonies (plants)

Dahlias (tubers)

Celoisia (seed)

Lemon Thyme (seed)

Basil (plant)

Parsley (seed)

Mullein (seed)

Dill (seed)

Mexican Tarragon (plant)

Garlic (bulbs)

Beets (seed)

Carrots (seed)

Corn (seed)

Big Boy Tomatoes (plant)

Roma Tomatoes (plant)

Cherry Tomatoes (plant)

Kentucky Pole Beans (seed)

Sugar Snap Peas (seed)

Green Onions (seed)

Texas Onions (seed)

Chives (plants)

Mammoth Jalapeno Peppers (plants)

Jalapeno Peppers (plants)

Green Bell Peppers (plants)

Yellow Squash (plants)

Zucchini Squash (plants)

Straight Eight Cucumbers (plants and seed)

Okra (seed)

Red Potatoes (slips)

Russet Potatoes (slips)

Blueberries:

We had a great blueberry season too; I froze 7 quarts of blueberries this year.  The awesome thing about our blueberries is that we got those 7 quarts from primarily one bush!  I have three bushes, one we transplanted last Fall from an area where it was getting too much shade.  I didn’t expect it to produce at all this year – it takes berries anywhere from one to three years to produce once they are planted.  But we did have a few berries on that bush, so I hope next year it will really thrive and produce well.  We have one other blueberry bush that I think also gets too much shade, but it produces about ¼ of our yield, and it pollinates the bigger one, so I think I will leave it where it is for now. 

I will be canning some blueberry preserves later this year.  I like to give small half pint jars of this for Christmas gifts.  I have decided that I want to add at least two more blueberry bushes this Fall, and maybe two blackberry bushes as well.  These bushes are on the right side of our house that gets 6 or more hours of sun and they have done so well in that space.

Flowers:

I added a couple of new varieties of dahlias tubers earlier this year, and I planted several new peony roots in the flower garden.  It can take peonies up to three years to bloom once planted, so I may not see new blooms for a couple of years, but just knowing they are planted is a treat!  In addition to what I have planted in the ground, I have pots tucked in everywhere I could find space for. We added a banana plant to the pool area this summer, our three hibiscus plants survived the winter in our basement, as well as the palm tree.

Probably the most meaningful additions to the garden are from Corkey’s Mama. She passed away in January, and he and his father wanted me to have any of her plants, statues, or garden décor that I wanted. Over the summer, we brought two truck loads of items from her garden to our house.  All the angel statues that you see are from her garden, all of the sedum plants, the large owl statue, all of the shepherd hooks and plant hooks are from her garden, as well as the birdhouses and bird feeders.  I am so grateful to have some of her lovely things in the garden now. We will go back and get her hostas and ferns when we start our woodland garden project next Spring.

Some junipers we had planted years ago on the bank beside the garden had died, so we just replaced ten of those last weekend.  It looks sparse in that area right now, one of the many places where we had some drainage issues.  I hope the junipers spread quickly and fill out the bare area, but if not, we will add some more in the Fall. 

I also want to add two to three more limelight hydrangeas along our fence line this Fall.  The large one we have had been transplanted from where our garden expansion is now.  It is healthy and doing well, but only about half the size it was previously.  I love using limelight hydrangeas in cut flower arrangements because they last forever, so I want to be able to cut them once or twice a week without compromising the blooms on the plant.

Front yard:

I didn’t include our front yard in the video. Unbelievably, it looks pretty good right now too!  I will do a video of the front another time. Of course, I have plans for the front as well.  We don’t have much going on in the way of plants or flowers at our mailbox and the other side of the driveway entrance.  I hope to be able to install in October/November, some knockout roses, a second planting of pampas grass, a second forsythia bush, several peonies, gladiola bulbs, and some hostas.

Additionally, we added a cobblestone parking pad extended from the left of our driveway several years ago when we became a three-car family.  I wanted our son to be able to pull up alongside our garage rather than parking outside the garage and us playing musical cars all the time.  The parking pad/cobblestone project turned out great, but now I would like to plant something besides grass along the exterior curve of the cobblestone area to soften it and add interest.  I am considering one crepe myrtle in the middle of the area, with a boxwood hedge on either side running the length of the cobblestone.  It’s about an 18-20 feet area, so it will take a lot of plants to fill it in.  It looks like we will be busy in the yard and garden this Fall and next Spring!

I am very fortunate that my husband loves working in the yard with me.  We have tackled so many projects together out there and it really is our happy place.  We may sell this place eventually and downsize, but I honestly can’t imagine being anywhere else.  This month marks 20 years we have been in this house.  We have countless memories here, and two dogs buried in the back yard, so I don’t know if I even have it in me to live anywhere else!

Do you have future garden projects planned for this Fall?  Tell me all about them!  Also, please keep Kinship & Vine in mind for all of your garden projects – as you can see, we are very passionate about garden design and we can do just about anything!