Here are some pictures of the rest of our garden….in this first picture you see four raised beds. The one on the far left is my hot pepper bed – I have 110 Red Fresno Peppers plants along with jalapeno, habanero, and cayenne! I use the Red Fresno peppers to make a killer wing sauce! Needless to say we like spicy food 🙂 These plants are now about a foot tall, bushy and blooming.
Last year I planted 1/2 bed in Fresnos and it wasn’t enough so this year I doubled it. The other hot peppers are at the end of the bed that contains our regular peppers – green, red, yellow, sweet Italian frying peppers….yummmmm! We use fresh during the summer, slice and freeze for stir fry after the season and dehydrate for salads during the winter! I even stuff some with a rice and cheese mixture and freeze for quick and easy dinners! The next bed over contains several varieties of dried beans – these are being pulled up this week and when dried we will have a shelling evening!
Next is carrots and onions – these have all been pulled and processed and the new plastic mulch is down and we are getting ready to plant pumpkins there.
The last bed has lettuce, snow peas, cucumbers, herbs and 2 varieties of cherry tomatoes. Both of our cherry tomatoes are hybrids – each year I try several heirlooms looking for a sweet cherry – this year I have tried Resintraube and Glacier….I’ll let you know how they are and I would love suggestions from those of you who have found your favorite heirloom cherry tomato! I would love to eliminate another hybrid from my garden…the only hybrids I grow are the cherry tomatoes and a few Early Girl tomatoes each year – because I am impatient for those home grown tomatoes 🙂
This next picture is of my pole beans….I wish they still looked this good. This is the only thing that I grow that the Japanese Beetles destroy – I am thinking about tilling them in and replanting in hopes of a crop after the beetles have gone….I don’t think I will get any from this planting. The beetles not only destroy the foliage…they eat the beans!
I grow Rattlesnake beans each year – very sweet and very prolific -it is an old southern heirloom.
This year I was also trying Fortex….hopefully I will get them replanted this week. What a disappointment…but thankfully we seem to have less and less problems with the beetles. A great suggestion to make your Milky Spore go a long way (it is very expensive)….pour it throughout your compost pile and let it inoculate the entire thing – then next year you can treat your whole garden for a fraction of the cost!
This picture is a shot down our lettuce aisle on one side and herbs on the other. We grow our lettuce under our peas and beans – this keeps it cool and protects it from the hot sun. We are still harvesting lettuce for salads and sandwiches….amazing considering we have had some very hot weather for weeks. The herbs on the right are in a border that rings the garden. We are still adding to that border and hopefully will have it completely full in a week or two.
On this side we have stevia, feverfew, calendula, lemon balm, Greek oregano, curry, high mallow, echinacea, comfrey, tansy and chamomile…my counters are full of colorful drying herbs and I have quite a few “bunches” hanging from the ceiling in my house drying…what a blessed bounty!
This last picture is of our squash and zucchini beds. They are still producing but not at the rate a few weeks ago – thank goodness! But they are succumbing to the squash vine borer as they do each year….if they are attacked too early in the season we inoculate with BT by using a hypodermic and injecting the base of each plant. This year it wasn’t necessary – I may do another small planting of squash to take us through to the first frost – we love it for fresh eating and Mom dehydrates it for winter use – wonderful for soups, stews and we even dehydrate some with a light sprinkle of salt – better than potato chips!
Thank you for strolling through my garden with me! I wish you could join me for a cup of tea or some lavender lemonade.
My next post will have some fascinating pictures of a strange white spotted creature that I found in the garden this year – and it turns out to be beneficial 🙂
The Essential Herbalist 
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