I did nothing to prepare my vegetable garden for these photos, so you're getting a look at a real garden, tended to by a real person who has a full time job. But is also always trying really hard to keep the garden cleaned up. But also has a second full time job which is replacing dead flowers with fresh ones in the 4,587,541 vases of flowers in the house.
Yep, that's life. Work, work, work, but still have failures. I try as much as I possibly can but there are still weeds in my vegetable garden. There are also dead plants, bugs, disease and the odd broken gardening tool.
If my garden is like this, you can fully excuse yourself if yours is the same. Pinterest gardens exist in two places, on Pinterest, and in Photoshop.
You can see the progression of the garden and my gardening style over the years from the raised beds of 2015 (I'm quoted in the book Raised Bed Revolution), to the newer, larger version of my community garden in 2019 and 2021 below.
2015
2019
2022
But today is about this year's garden. Watch the drone video I took a couple of years ago so you can get the full perspective of my garden.
Table of Contents
44 Vegetable Garden Photos & Tips
From the year 2023. Each photo will include 1 tip.
1. Install an irrigation system.
I installed my watering system years ago after many more years of putting it off. It seemed complicated and the few guides to it on the Internet just made it seem even more complicated.
It's not complicated. I've broken it all down step by step so the average home gardener can install an irrigation system.
2. Plant tall flowers or asparagus around the garden for privacy and wind block.
I just planted peas at the base of the netting a couple of weeks ago so I should get a little batch of peas in the fall. The flowers that are glowing yellow are Hot Biscuits amaranth that was planted very late in the season but they'll bloom into October.
5. Too many zucchini? Last week I found out that this zucchini entree with pasta and pesto freezes really well.
6. If you grow celosia in your garden (flower on the lower left) once, it will reseed itself for the rest of all time. Ditto for amaranth.
7. Grow what you LOVE and what you'll use. I LOVE potatoes, so I grow 32' of them.
8. If you haven't yet, pinch the top off of your tomato plants today. You want all the energy going towards the tomatoes on the plant right now, not towards growing new tomatoes that won't have time to mature.
Flowers
🌸 9 If you want BIG blooms on your dahlias, pinch off the buds on either side of the main centre bud, PLUS remove the two lateral branches below the bud.
🌸 10 If you want MANY blooms on your dahlias, just let them grow. You'll have much smaller flowers, but more of them.
🌸 11 Cut flowers in the morning or evening is the guideline we're always given. Why? Because that's when the flowers have the most moisture in them so they'll be less prone to wilting. BUT ...
You can cut your flower any time of day if you do this as soon as you bring them inside:
TIP 12
Lay flowers in a sink full of water and let them soak after cutting. It will hydrate them completely and help them last as long as possible. Even the wiltiest bloom will come back to life after submerging in water for an hour or so.
Since my flower garden is a 10 minute drive away from my home (and I never remember to bring a bucket of water for them to travel in), I use this tip every time I bring flowers home.
13. Grow sweet potatoes in pots, not the ground to protect your harvest from voles, mice and other rodents of good taste.
14. Second plantings generally take longer to grow than first plantings because there's less sun later in the summer.
15. Try, try again. I've tried to grow rutabaga for years. I gave up. This year I tried again. It was a success. This kind of thing happens all the time.
16. Rutabaga grown at home grow oblong or lightbulb shaped instead of round. This is normal. Don't worry about it.
17. Carrots come in tons of fun colours like purple, red, yellow and white. BUT before you grow those fun colours think of how you'll use them. A purple or beige carrot soup isn't as appealing as an orange one.
18. You'll make mistakes. You will fail. Behold my cauliflower/strawberry patch this year. It happens to all of us. You're not a cruddy gardener. You're trying and learning. Now go have a beer.
19. Power lines are not an imminent hazard or safety issue. I get asked that question a LOT because my community garden is directly below power lines.
20. If your squash leaves are dying and the plant is wilting you probably have Squash Vine Borer which you can get rid of by cutting it out of the squash stem! If you get it out soon enough your squash plant will live to see the autumn and the squash will live to see the inside of your belly.
21. Like squash but don't need to grow ones that are 15 lbs each? There are tons of 1-2 serving varieties like the one above, Goldilocks.
Also try: Delicata, Honeynut, Butterscotch or Sweet Dumpling for smaller serving squashes.
22. Buy seeds from reputable sellers. Last year I bought Sweetie Drop pepper seeds off of Amazon. After months of growing they revealed themselves to be NOT Sweetie Drop peppers. This year I bought reputable seeds and got Sweetie Drops.
23. Pepper plants are perennials. If you can keep them alive inside, you can replant them outside year after year.
Reputable Seed Sellers
(I've repeatedly bought seeds from all of these places)
- Johnny's Select Seed 🇺🇸
- Baker Creek 🇺🇸 (seeds are always great, but they really push marketing and the plants aren't always the same as they say they are. Case in point, the Cosmic Cherry Petunia.)
- William Dam 🇨🇦
- Stokes 🇺🇸 🇨🇦
- Territorial Seed Company 🇺🇸
- Floret 🇺🇸
- West Coast Seeds 🇨🇦
- Veseys 🇨🇦
- Incredible Seeds 🇨🇦
- West Coat Seeds 🇨🇦
24. COVER your brassicas It will keep cabbage moth off of them. Cabbage moth lay eggs, which hatch into caterpillars which infest your cabbage, broccoli, kale etc.
25. If you cut your cabbage just above soil line earlier in the season, each plant will grow another 2 or 3 small cabbages from the cut point on the same plant.
26. Dinosaur kale (black, lacinato) is less prone to cabbage moth damage than other kales.
27. Broccoli, like cabbage, will create more smaller florets off the stem once you cut the main head. So don't pull the whole plant out if you want more broccoli.
28. The oblong vegetable to the left is luffa. Yes. You can grow your own luffa sponge if you have patience and my guide.
29. Always pull or cut the lower leaves off of tomato plants to help keep them disease free and healthy.
30. Heirloom tomatoes like this are sort of flower shaped when they're sliced across the meridian. They're described as scalloped, pleated, ridged or ribbed.
31. Picking a tomato at this stage will prevent it from splitting if a big rain comes.
32. Cracking or splitting can happen at the stem end or sides of a tomato. They're fine to eat (just cut the cracked portion off) but will go bad more quickly than a tomato without cracking.
33. Tomatoes ripen from the top of the cluster down to the bottom. So if you want the ripest, always pick the first on the cluster.
34. One of the best materials to keep pests out is ¼" hardware cloth dug at least 6" into the ground.
35. Onions are ready to harvest when their tops start to fall over. When this happens push all the tops over and then do this with them.
37. Dedicate a spot in your garden to flowers you can cut without guilt. When you grow them in your landscaping you're less likely to snip their heads off.
38. Cucumbers usually suffer from cucumber wilt which is transmitted by cucumber beetles. If a cucumber plant seems to go wilted overnight pull it out and put it in the garbage. Getting rid of it right away helps lessen the chance the plants around it will become diseased as well.
39. The blossom end of pickles contains an enzyme that will make your pickles soft, so cut that end off before pickling.
40. Pushing a seed in the soil isn't gardening. Everything that comes before and after that event is.
If you'd like to learn about how gardening is like therapy you can read this article I wrote for The Old Farmer's Almanac. It's more hilarious than it sounds.
And finally ...
A Bonus TIP
If you grow wheat in a 7' x 3' bed, you will harvest 1 lb of wheat berries.
1 lb of wheat berries
=
3 cups of wheat berries
=
5 cups of flour
Guess what?! If you're mad you didn't plant wheat this spring you can ALSO plant it in the fall. So ... here you go. 👇🏻
Is growing your own wheat worth it? God no. It takes FOREVER to thresh and fluff and separate it by hand.
For a paltry 3 cups of wheat berries I spend hours stooped over a cotton laundry bag whacking, cleaning and preparing the grain, which is now proudly displayed in my kitchen vault.
Happy gardening.
What is the best malch should I use
I laughed so hard about growing your own wheat.... and if it was worth your time. Thank you! Found it so humorous :)
Don't give me too much credit. Everyone knows wheat is intrinsically hilarious. ~ karen!
After success with string trellises and tomato pruning, I'm excited to try the 2.0 hinged hoop house. I've also seen references to the hardware cloth tent for strawberry beds but haven't been able to find a step by step like with the hoop house. Any chance you could share? The chipmunks are eating everything in sight.
Hi Kelly Jane! The strawberry beds were built by adding 2x2s to these brackets from Lee Valley. Then I stapled hardware cloth onto the frame once the frame was built. You can see the built strawberry bed at the bottom of this post. ~ karen!
Every year new types of bugs appear (apparently from hell), and two of the new ones this year (unless it's the same??) are
A. One that burrows into the tiny baby squash fruit from the end of the fruit (closer to the vine) (long before its old enough to get fertilized).
B. And one that burrows into the flower end and eats the flower, again, long before it's remotely old / big enough to get pollinated.
---
Initially I thought the plant was just having some difficulty recovering from the vine borer I cut out (actually I poked a stick up into its hole and skewerd it, muwahaha!), but I when I tried to manually pollinate, the flowers I opened were already rotten inside. Then I started finding the tiny holes bored into the fruit and flower ends. Ugh! Having trouble finding out what is doing this. Anyone else ever seen this? Zone 8 here. --- I know butterflies are supposed to be beneficial and pretty and whatnot, but they also make caterpillars and worms, which are eating my food. I'm really starting to hate butterflies. Grrr...
Hey! For me the most common thing to find inside a squash type flower is either bees or cucumber beetles. And many cucumber beetles could do that kind of damage. ~ karen!
Ah, I'll have to look them up, didn't think I had any, but so many bugs to learn to identify!
(Although when I was washing one of the little baby zukes and found a hole, I pulled the bottom off with my nail and I thought I saw a worm fall out, but it went down the drain so fast I can't be completely certain.)
Also odd, whatever species of yellow summer squash they were selling this year is acting weird. Most summer squash, in my limited experience, as the plant grows the only new growth is from the growing end and bottom of the stem becomes bare, but this weird one is not only trying to grow branching vines in addition to the main stem, but new flowers and leaves are sprouting from the entire length of the stem. I've been cutting away the leaves below where the bottom most fruit is, but the whole thing just keeps sprouting! It's weird. The stupid bugs love it. I've gotten one squash. Hopefully with all its craziness I'll get some more.
It also has THORNS. Not just spines like the other varieties, thorns. Everywhere. Stems, leaves, all over.
I discovered pepper plants were perennials by accident when I just left last year's jalapeno plant in its pot over the winter (OK to do here in Florida!) and it's outproducing the new plant I bought in case that first one didn't survive! Also, my cat snacked on the that first plant, eating it almost to the ground TWICE before I got it out of her reach, and that only seems to have made it tougher.
I'm a very haphazard, lazy gardener so I love reading about your garden and all your tips. Maybe someday I'll live in a place with fewer bugs and less humidity and I'll actually enjoy gardening again.
Oh lord, don't move this way if you're looking for less humidity. ~ karen!
I was wondering.
O' my, don't I wish my garden looked like your worst year.
I saw a bottle that I believed to be a DECANTER on the table in the image for the potted sweet potatoes. I gasp, and said aloud, " O' no she didn't! I went to get my glasses and put them on, zoomed in to the image and there it is, a watering can. Disappointed and feeling silly. Because if Karen can do it so can I. Yes I actually thought she took her wine decanter with wine to her garden to endulge while gardening, so can I.
Thank you Karen.
I am trying wheat for the first time this fall. Yep, I went to the farm store and got my seeds.
I'm pretty sure the wine decanter would be so full of bugs by the time I got it into the garden and set down on a table that it would require more chewing than drinking. ~ karen!
Tip 12: My father used to buy (or maybe get them from some farmer he knew) huge bouquets of flowers home once a year. Then my parents would leave them in the bathtub filled with water until they put them in vases. Now I understand why.
Tip 23: didn't know that pepper plants are perennials. Haven't had much success growing them. If I can manage to grow tomatoes indoors in the winter (even got a couple of golf-ball-size fruits), I should be able to grow peppers too.
Holy CRAP, what a wealth of information! Legit taking notes from this post. Thanks, Karen!
That's great, thanks for letting me know! It's a lot of information I know, but you learn it over years so don't worry if it doesn't all stick in your brain right now. ~ karen!
I love your garden.
Your organizational skills are phenomenal. I can't even fathom how many different things you're able to grow successfully in the allotted space. Definitely have garden envy! My father was the gardener in my family but didn't have the time for anything this time-consuming. But we still enjoyed every little thing that he grew - totally remember doing green beans like for hours on end and the year he grew peanuts was really fun. Really miss him...
What beautiful gardens! My question... it looks like permanent structures for certain veggies, do you rotate your crops? I've never had wilt before, but had it this year. It will be a challenge to move things around. Thanks for your thoughts!
Hi Susan. Thanks! Some structures are permanent but I use them in different ways depending on the year and how I plan the garden. But I don't concern myself with crop rotation. I don't think moving a crop 20' to the left in a home garden will put it out of reach for any disease or insect in there. If you have a HUGE farm with acreage yes, but a home garden? In my experience it doesn't really help. (crop rotation for soil conditions is useful if you don't amend your soil regularly though). ~ karen!
Once again, your photos are wonderful. I never knew your 39th tip about cucumbers! And your garden at its worst is so much better than most gardens at their best. Thanks for the stroll through your little piece of the earth.
Your garden looks absolutely brilliant to me! Mine is lovely too but way smaller and with masses more weeds, especially nettles! But the butterflies and the bees like them so we’re happy! Great tip about tying tomatoes up a rope- I never thought of that!