Hello and welcome to my backyard garden at Not Quite a Homestead!
I’m going to do my best to give you a text and pictorial tour of my raised bed garden so you can get an idea of what I grow and how.
If you have any questions, please save them for the end of the tour and leave a comment down below. 🙂
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The Basics of Our Backyard Garden
I garden in central Indiana, zone 6A. I currently have 7 raised beds built from untreated Southern yellow pine, and I also grow food and flowers in the ground.
Our main growing season stretches from the end of April through October. Although it’s always a risk to plant early, I push my limits every year I can!
There are three trellises connecting 6 of the raised beds so that I can grow vertically.
My husband built our raised beds in 2021 and they are still going strong today. The corners are secured with metal brackets and the wood gets brushed with raw linseed oil once a year.
(Except for this year. I forgot to do that.)
The picture above shows what our beds looked like the first spring we planted our garden.
Now in between the beds, and all throughout the in-ground garden space, we have wood chip mulch which we sourced through Chip Drop.
I decided to use wood chip for our pathways and ground cover because:
- 1) It’s biodegradable and will enrich the soil.
- 2) It’s free if you obtain it from arborists.
- 3) It’s temporary–if I decide to rearrange my garden layout or use a different material, it’s very easy to move the wood chips.
I am still loving our wood chip mulch. Yes, there are still weeds that grow, but they are typically easy to pull.
So far (4 years later), our DIY raised garden beds have held up quite well. We added another layer of wood chip mulch in between the beds this past spring.
I’m still very happy with the design and functionality of our garden boxes.
What I’m Growing in My Backyard Garden
We grow vegetables, fruit trees and bushes, and lots of cut flowers in raised beds and in the ground. We also have ornamental gardens surrounding our patio, property line, and front yard.
I especially love hydrangeas, so those guys get planted in just about every new flower bed. They are so easy to maintain with just a single pruning each year.
In this picture, I have Incrediball Hydrangeas blooming, plus a Sweet Summer Love Clematis, and down below is a single sage plant that I grew from seed in 2020—from my first attempt at growing a vegetable garden.
This is the main entrance off our patio into the raised bed garden.
In the Raised Bed Garden
Homegrown tomatoes are the best, by the way. And the beans. And the cucumbers. Really everything tastes best fresh from your own garden!
My key crops every year are:
- tomatoes
- peppers
- snap peas
- string beans
- cucumbers
- onions
- zucchini
- tromboncino squash
- winter squash
- potatoes
- sweet potatoes
- garlic
I also grow herbs intermingled with my main crops.
- sage
- mint
- oregano
- lemon thyme
- chives
- parsley
- basil
- holy basil or tulsi
The first 5 herbs are perennial, which is great because I don’t have to plant them every year. I just wait for them to come back.
Some of these herbs are grown just for herbal teas. Whatever I don’t use fresh gets dehydrated or preserved in salt.
Below, you can see oregano and chives growing at the very front, accompanied by this pastel blend sweet alyssum.
I love how it hangs over the edge of the raised bed.
There’s pineapple sage (annual), parsley, and kale growing behind it.
In the Ground
Whatever vegetables and seedlings don’t fit in the raised beds get planted in the ground in any of the beds surrounding our backyard.
Recently, I’ve been using sweet potatoes as ground cover. The lush vines cover everything, and at the end of the season, we have sweet potatoes.
To the far left of the photo, you can see the sweet potato vines covering that whole section. Off the the right are our raised beds and cut-flower garden.
We have a small orchard on the north side of our yard where we grow apples and peaches, and we recently added a nectarine and planted a fig tree in the ground.
Previously, our figs were grown in large containers that we bring in for the winter, but I wanted to try one fig in the ground with winter protection. We’ll see how that does.
My husband takes care of our orchard and keeps the trees small so they are easy to pick. He’s learned a lot about this method of growing fruit trees from this book by Ann Ralph.
Our berries are scattered throughout the backyard—raspberries by the compost bin, blackberries in the orchard, and blueberries in the island garden.
Additionally, we have a raised bed filled with perennial asparagus and strawberries and two GreenStalks with strawberries.
The Cut-Flower Garden
My cut-flower garden is a relatively new addition to Not Quite a Homestead and I absolutely love having it. I wrote a post about starting a cut-flower garden from scratch here.
At the end of the raised beds, I kept expanding the garden over the lawn using the sheet-mulching method and covering it all with wood chips.
I think I’m done expanding. I think… Probably not.
I’m still experimenting and dabbling with cut-flowers, but so far, this is what I’ve been growing in my cut flower garden.
- zinnias
- celosia
- amaranth
- dahlias
- sunflowers
- sedum and other perennials
- basil
- larkspur
- sweet pea flowers
- orlaya
- feverfew
- cosmos
- yarrow
Planting zinnias and sunflowers were the extent of my flower growing the first couple years of gardening.
I used to think flowers weren’t worth investing in, but I’ve come to discover that it’s fun to pick and arrange flowers.
See what worked and didn’t work in my first year of arranging flowers here.
Flowers also draw in all kinds of good bugs and pollinators, which makes for a healthy, thriving garden ecosystem. Companion planting with flowers is always a good idea, especially in an organic vegetable garden!
Other Fun Garden Things at Not Quite a Homestead
The arch trellises connecting the raised beds are my favorite part of the vegetable garden.
It’s both for looks and function. I explain more about key design elements for kitchen gardens in this post.
Walking under a leafy green trellis is magical. Seeing beans and cucumbers and squash dangling down, begging to be picked is unbelievably wonderful.
Vertical growing makes it so easy to harvest food, especially green beans.
Last year, we added a cold frame around the south side of our house. I’d been talking about having one since we started planning our original backyard garden, and it did not disappoint.
Here is what the cold frame looked like in December when all the other plants outside had already died back.
One August, I had a massive zucchini plant erupting out of this box.
But I’m looking forward to growing cold weather crops in there again this winter.
The Backyard Garden from Spring to Summer to Fall and Winter
The real magic of the garden is watching it go from brown and bare to green and gorgeous in just a few months.
Below is a photo of the garden in March when I was messing around with the layout of the cut flower garden. The second picture was taken in August (view is the opposite of the first photo).
All those tiny seedlings carefully planted, tended, and hardened off have grown into large, thriving plants.
And this happens every year. Pretty amazing.
Sometime in October, we get a cold snap that kills off the warm season plants. They get all brown and ugly and die.
But the cold-hardy things really start to shine in the fall. Because they’re the only things left growing, they command your attention and demand gratitude since they alone have stuck with you.
When winter comes, it’s a dormant, quiet kind of beauty.
The backyard garden sleeps and gives me a chance to rest. This is when I plan for the next year (as early as December) and get ready to move things around.
Typically I look at lots of seed catalogues and read all these favorite gardening books.
I Am a Gardener
As I’ve come to own the label of “gardener,” I am enjoying every second of observing plants grow and seeing how they look together.
I get excited to grow new plants.
I am forever moving plants around re-designing.
I love editing my backyard garden as I learn more and more about what I want from my garden and what it wants from me.
Not Quite a Homestead is all about
- growing as a gardener,
- not being afraid to fail,
- realizing perfection isn’t the priority,
- and enjoying the bounty of the garden.
Those are my goals as a gardener, not-quite-a-homesteader, wife, mom, and blogger.
I hope you follow along this garden journey with me on Not Quite a Homestead.
To read more about what I’ve learned as a gardener try one of these posts next:
