Hello everyone! I know that you’ve enjoyed Steph’s garden updates in the past and this year, I finally have the space for a garden.

At our house in Maine, we have three spaces that we are able to use for a garden. The first is a pre-existing bed that is a brick lined circular shape. The bed was used in the past for flowers and occasional herb. It is now going to be used as our primary veggie bed!

The second space is a new garden bed that we put in front of our house. This bed is lined with rocks from the back of the property and will be used for wildflowers, herbs, and strawberries.

Finally, we are using the end of our driveway to place potatoes and onions that are growing in pots.

We haven’t done any gardening in Maine before and are looking forward to seeing how it turns out. This garden is primarily for fun and to supplement our food. We did, however, subscribe to a local CSA (community supported agriculture) program and are expecting to receive a SIGNIFICANT amount of vegetables this summer.

Look out for future posts on food preservation, we will certainly have an abundance this year!

The Veggie Garden Bed

In this bed, we are planting all of the seedlings that we started earlier in the season. These seedlings include:

1. three types of tomatoes
2. cucumbers
3. sugar snap peas
4. bush beans
5. basil
6. cilantro

The cucumber, pea, and bean seedlings are NOT doing well. They were planted as more of an experiment than anything and they started flowering in early April!

Our tomatoes did quite well and are planted in the center of this bed with the tomato cages.

The remainder of our plants were direct sowed since they require warmer temperatures and typically do not have a long growing period. These include:

1. carrots
2. radishes
3. sugar snap peas
4. bush beans
5. basil
6. a variety of lettuces (to act as groundcover)

The wildflower and herb bed

When we moved into this house, there was no garden bed here, just grass.

When it started to get nice out, we began digging up the grass and spent quite a bit of time sifting out the larger rocks (gotta love New England soil!) before we were happy with the soil quality. I absolutely love how this bed turned out!

In this bed, we utilized a more guerilla gardening approach, simply spreading a variety of seeds and seeing what comes up.

In this bed we have:

1. a variety of annual and perennial wildflower seeds
2. foxglove seeds
3. herb seeds:
   • basil
   • cilantro
   • sage
   • lemon balm
   • thyme
   • oregano
4. Chamomile plants (a gift from a friend!)

In addition to this list, we are planning to put some strawberry plants that we have. We are also going to be collecting local wildflower seeds around the area this fall to add to the bed.

The Onion and Potato Pots

We were at Sam’s Club a few weeks ago and saw a great deal on sprouted potatoes and starter onions. Rather than planting in the ground, we decided to plant these in pots to save time and are looking forward to seeing how they turn out.

We also have two pots with strawberries but haven’t seen much activity yet, hopefully they come up.

I hope you enjoyed a sneek peak into our garden for the year and let me know if you would like any specifics regarding the variety of veggies that we are growing.

Thanks for reading and please check out Steph’s other garden-related posts. – Hailey